Do you get a lot of those phishing emails that say <your email addy> has made a <big purchase> etc.?

[Muse]

They always say something like if I've got an issue with it I should call such and such phone number. I can always tell they are phony.

They will say something like I bought an Apple phone, or it's a new transaction alert involving Paypal or it was involved with some large financial institution but the return email address invariably is just plain weird.

I've been getting them several times a day for, hell, must be close to a year now. None of these people know the 1st thing about me other than my email address, so I assume somebody hacked some database and sold a ton of email addresses to someone who sells them to scammers or they do it directly.

I called my ISP a time or two and they said they would tighten up their scam filtering for me but I'm still getting a lot of these. In fact it's getting worse lately. I think some other creep got ahold of my email from data having to do with politics or financial stuff. Or maybe they just assumed that most people are involved with that stuff.

Anyway, I'm curious how common this is and what people are doing about it. I could change my email address but informing companies, utilities, financial institutions, family, etc. would be a pain. I've done it before, though but it's been quite a few years.

I sometimes get the urge to call one of those numbers and see what happens. If I get a human, yell at them and ask them why they don't get a job instead of being a creep. But I don't.

 

[mindless1]

No I don't get that type, but every so often when I see a sender domain name pattern that I can block with a filter, I do. Depending on your setup, that filtering could happen at the email provider, and/or your email client app, or once upon a time ago I even used a separate email proxy app that went in-between to filter, but that was more of a PITA because then I had to check it too, to see what it blocked if I was expecting an email that hadn't arrived in my inbox.

If you call them, odds are good that you will be placed on an even higher value spam or robocall list. People who call the number are the gold mine of spamming, exactly who they are fishing for. Don't click the links, either.

I also block the remote loading content in the HTML emails (set it to perm-allow on trusted senders) so there is no evidence I viewed any email nor do they get the IP address, so no evidence it is a live email account to cause it to be of higher spam list value. I have more control over that using a local email client (Thunderbird) instead of webmail.

 

[balloonshark]

I've been getting something similar with yahoo mail. They come with an attachment that I don't dare click on.

Re: Thank you for the Order V9DCA.7653QNP73NL3I

Fwd: RE: QUICK Order FOR QUJRTS6XHU.3NCEX6CX9_UTKD

Action Needed: Invoice VKEM 38682 FYERYE Due for Payment

 

[Muse]

No I don't get that type, but every so often when I see a sender domain name pattern that I can block with a filter, I do.

If you call them, odds are good that you will be placed on an even higher value spam or robocall list. People who call the number are the gold mine of spamming, exactly who they are fishing for. Don't click the links, either.

I also block the remote loading content in the HTML emails so there is no evidence I viewed any email nor do they get the IP address. I have more control over that using a local email client (Thunderbird) instead of webmail.

I rarely access my webmail. I download my emails, usually several times a day to either of my frequently used laptops, leaving them on the server. Occasionally I get messaging from my ISP that my inbox is getting close to capacity and I call them and have them delete emails up to a certain date, e.g. a year ago or 6 months or whatever. AFAIK, nobody's getting info about what I'm seeing.

I use a 3rd party email client, separately installed on my laptops or whatever PC's I might use. It's an old version of Forte Agent. It doesn't support HTML other than to allow me to hit links if I so choose. I'm pretty careful about what I hit that way.

I don't know if my email client informs a sender if I've opened an email, I kind of doubt it.

 

[Muse]

I've been getting something similar with yahoo mail. They come with an attachment that I don't dare click on.

Yeah, I have similar, but it's not yahoo or gmail. I do have a gmail address which I have configured to forward to my ISP account. I never seem to get spam to that address though. I have my email client configured to direct email to my gmail address into a folder specifically created for it.

 

[mindless1]

I rarely access my webmail. I download my emails, usually several times a day to either of my frequently used laptops, leaving them on the server. Occasionally I get messaging from my ISP that my inbox is getting close to capacity and I call them and have them delete emails up to a certain date, e.g. a year ago or 6 months or whatever. AFAIK, nobody's getting info about what I'm seeing.

I use a 3rd party email client, separately installed on my laptops or whatever PC's I might use. It's an old version of Forte Agent. It doesn't support HTML other than to allow me to hit links if I so choose. I'm pretty careful about what I hit that way.

I used to use Forte back in the day, but once I had some need (that I forget at the moment) for more features, I switched to Thunderbird Portable and never looked back. Sometimes I want to see the HTML for example, but there's so many more access/use/backup options with it being Portable too.

I just set it up to delete the messages off the server after 14 days, or another option it provides is "Until I delete them" (in T'Bird). Every now and then when I want to clean up, I just make a zipped backup of the entire T'Bird portable folder, then delete the old messages. I can always open the backup and see them later if I need to. I also backup the entire folder unzipped to a USB flash drive, so can use it anywhere, and through network sharing and a simple shortcut to launch T'Bird, can access same portable installation to check email across the lan on different PCs - but only one system at a time can have T'Bird open to use.

Gmail does have better automatic filtering than my ISP provided accounts do, but I'm slowly transitioning away from the ISP accounts anyway because the ISPs keep changing hands with a concern that the old domain name may go away at some point, OR I keep mulling around the idea of changing ISPs (so I'd lose those email accounts immediately) because they keep creeping their rates up faster than inflation. AFAIK, my current ISP doesn't even offer email accounts to new customers, though my legacy account still has 5 or so through them.

 

[Muse]

I do have kill filters (that I have to set up one by one, which is a hassle) on a ton of senders which will divert future emails from them directly into a junk folder, (which I rarely check, I rarely have reason to). Thing is, a lot of the spam I get appears to be from senders who change their return address constantly, so kill filters for them don't help at all. When I figure that's what I'm getting I just delete the email or ignore it.

I also unsubscribe from a lot of shit, but I have a feeling that a lot of those fork out to multiple senders. This has been happening to me a lot lately. I put kill filters on them, but if they are switching return addresses or even domains, my option is to delete or just ignore. I guess I should be more wary of giving out my email address at websites.

 

[mindless1]

I started looking at where legit emails were coming from, then felt I could risk it and block entire top level domains. For example not too long ago I blocked these 4 for excessive spam:

.gb.net
.herokuapp.com
.info
.de

... Yes, I am blocking Germany, I don't get messages from Germans using .de now. I realized any correspondence I have with Germans is through a company or developer with their own .com or .org domain for email if not gmail. Same goes for other country specific top level domains, I'm just never receiving any from legit senders, but I could put them in an exceptions list if I needed to.

I never unsubscribe unless it's a company I've done business with that had a legitimate excuse to put me on their mailing list in the first place. Otherwise I consider the sender a spammer by default.

The annoying part is when I attempt to purchase something from a web store, get most of the way through the checkout, including providing my email address, only to find on the last checkout page that they charge exorbitant shipping so I don't submit the order, so have never done business with them, didn't even set up an account with them, yet I end up on their mailing list anyway.

 

[lxskllr]

I don't get spam at all. Every once in a blue moon I get something purporting to be from my boss, but that's because he's dumb, and has been hacked so many times, his email is probably a selectable default in the scam-O-matic software configuration. I just delete it.

 

[nakedfrog]

Oh yeah, I get lots of these on my older email addresses.

 

[Muse]

I started looking at where legit emails were coming from, then felt I could risk it and block entire top level domains. For example not too long ago I blocked these 4 for excessive spam:

.gb.net
.herokuapp.com
.info
.de

... Yes, I am blocking Germany, I don't get messages from Germans using .de now. I realized any correspondence I have with Germans is through a company or developer with their own .com or .org domain for email if not gmail. Same goes for other country specific top level domains, I'm just never receiving any from legit senders, but I could put them in an exceptions list if I needed to.

I never unsubscribe unless it's a company I've done business with that had a legitimate excuse to put me on their mailing list in the first place. Otherwise I consider the sender a spammer by default.

The annoying part is when I attempt to purchase something from a web store, get most of the way through the checkout, including providing my email address, only to find on the last checkout page that they charge exorbitant shipping so I don't submit the order, so have never done business with them, didn't even set up an account with them, yet I end up on their mailing list anyway.

Yep, I hate those sites that bogart their shipping fee until after grabbing your email address. It's happened to me too. Don't know a lot about email filtering but my version of Forte Agent (1.932, real old!) does give me a lot of options. I have a ton of filters set up. The weirdest thing is they don't always work. Sometimes a filter sends an email to the wrong folder. Sometimes is doesn't, apparently without my changing a thing. It's nuts.