Spam increase

M

Markjbloggs

Registered User
Messages
384
Anyone else have a dramatic increase in Spam as of Wednesday this week - I estimate that I am now getting triple what I used to get, mostly from stock market related spammers. And, no, I did not sign up for anything in the past few weeks....
 
Looks like you may have to change your address, a real pain I know but probably the only sure fire way!
 
May not stop them coming in but have you tried setting up spam filters?
Also, what mail are you using? I use gmail, I may get 7-800 spam mails a month, but it all goes into a spam filter folder, I never see any of it.
 
Markjbloggs said:
Anyone else have a dramatic increase in Spam as of Wednesday this week - I estimate that I am now getting triple what I used to get, mostly from stock market related spammers. And, no, I did not sign up for anything in the past few weeks....
Click to expand...

Someone may just be better leveraging his list of addresses, or may have sold the list with you on it etc.
 
Strange. I have a gmail account and have never got one piece of spam ever!! My email is used for a number of websites (all the usual ones such as amazon or play.com).

However for any less well-known sites I also have a hotmail account which I don't care how junk filled it gets. This account too remains spam-free...
 
It really depends on how 'promiscuous' you are with the email address, plus a bit of (bad) luck on top of that. If you post it on bulletin boards etc then you'll most likely get Spam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address_harvesting

"harvesting bots" or "harvesters", which spider Web pages, postings on Usenet, mailing list archives, and other online sources to obtain e-mail addresses from public data.
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Then again if someones address book containing your email address is compromised, through no fault of your own.
 
uiop said:
get gmail and in future to keep your email free of spam and protected for along time, register a separate gmail address for forwarding like mailinglist1020302@ gmail . com and use the forwarding feature to forward stuff you sign up to. Then check where spam is coming from when it gets too heavy and change your forwarding address but keep the lists u like etc.
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Id second this as well.

another tip is when registering with a site use a middle name or initial, e.g. you sign up to aam use "joe aam bloggs", spammers will use that name leading you back to point of origin. That wont stop the spam but at least you'll know where it came from.
 
UPDATE :- back to a normal level of spam overnight, the usual types and none of the stock market related stuff that had been flooding my inbox over the past week. I changed nothing to achieve this and have no idea why it started and has now finished!!!

Thanks for all the suggestions - I had already been using Yahoo e-mail addresses for signing up to items online, so this was not a possible cause.
 
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