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Sup.
Lately I've seemingly started to get more and more unwanted spam on my Hotmail email account.
Whereas I used to get maybe one or two a week, I seem to be getting ten or more a day sometimes now.
I'm usually pretty careful what I enter my email or any details into but obviously I've lapsed somewhere and some spammers are picking up on it.
It's annoying....
Anyone have any tips for tracing what you may have done to invite it? Is it even possible to trace that sort of thing considering it's probably some months old web form long since forgotten.
And no, I haven't been joining any of 'those' sites... 😀
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Its quiet possible nothings changed other than the various spammers that have your address already have just gotten better at getting their stuff past any of hotmail's filters. Or the address has been passed on to someone who's either better at, or more prolific with, their spamming.
Theres no point in tracing it to a source - once acquired (or guessed - any hotmail address is going to end in @hotmail... so you only need to keep trying random characters in front of the @) target addresses will traded and exchanged widely.
use site specific addresses?
stw.kayak23@hotmail
twitter.kayak23..
etc
pain to setup but you can monitor them all in one place.
I get loads of spam on hotmail but it's usually pretty well filtered into the appropriate folder.
"your cancelled Amazon order" is the current favourite.
You could try this.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-trace-your-emails-back-to-the-source/
I've noticed the same, getting around 10-15 emails a day now. Pretty sure someone along the line has sold on/got hold of my email address. The received email is always different but follows the same formatting every time.
This probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, don't ever follow a link in SPAM, for many reasons but a confirmed "watched" email address is an awful more valuable than an unwatched orphan mailbox.
"your cancelled Amazon order" is the current favourite.
I've suddenly been on the receiving end of these,a few turn up in the Junk Folder every day.
I've lost count of the number of spam mails that had an email that only approximated mine, but they have dropped off a lot, the ones I get most are touting for new boilers, health insurance, that kind of stuff, which I delete.
Page! Amateurs.
I opened Mail on my desktop this evening. Mail is pretty good at spotting spam and filtering it accordingly. 680 something in the junk folder. I emptied it on Monday.
The annoying part is Mail on iOS has a junk folder. It still ends up in the inbox. I'm seriously considering changing my main email address but it's in too many genuine places that I couldn't begin to imagine how long it would take to update everything.
use site specific addresses?stw.kayak23@hotmail
twitter.kayak23..etc
pain to setup but you can monitor them all in one place.
A friend of mine who has his own domain did just this and then had ago at those who has passed it on without his consent. He got lost of grovelling apologies when he threatened them offwhicheveroneitisforthis
my solution to hotmail spam, is use the hotmail account for registering all yer shite to. let it spam.
use a gmail acount for any actual mail. The google spam filter seems better, but I guess that's helped a lot cause i've not used it to register with hundreds of sites over the years.
Own domain and specific address per site you sign up to at least traces back the source of the leak. Then you can block the address when it starts getting loads of spam. Some are sites which pass the email on deliberately when they shouldn't, but most are just poor security on their site and they get hacked, leaking the email addresses (it's why I also refuse to let shop sites store my credit card details "for convenience").
Source of the spam is very difficult as it's all from random computers, mostly PCs and servers that have been infected and are being used as bots to send spam.
I had my email address sold by my professional body to a financial services firm. Needless to say I did trace it - they were a legitimate firm selling loans to nurses. I got the financial services firm to confirm they got the email address from the NMC and then got the NMC censured by the data commissioner and a written apology from the NMC for breaching the data protection act. The NMC claimed they had done no wrong but the data commissioner disagreed
My spam count went up a while back. Its an address I've had for a long time registered on hundreds of sites. It falls into two groups, the random pure spam and unsolicited email lists. I've now taken to reporting the spam rather than just deleting it. Its still one click. For the unsolicited lists they usually have a unsubscribe. I've always been wary of clicking in this as I thought it marked the account as active but I now click on it. Seems to have worked as I get hardly any now.
When registering an email address with a site put a +site between your name and the @. Example: kayak23+S****hotmail.com. Hotmail (and Gmail, don't know if this is a standard email thing) ignore anything between the + and the @ so will direct all mail to kayak23@hotmail.com without the need for multiple email addresses. Picked up this tip from here a few months ago. Works brilliantly.
The "+" tip is gmail and hotmail only I think, the standard says that everything before the @ symbol must be "interpreted and assigned semantics" by the domain indicated by the bit after the @ symbol. So it's basically up to each email provider to sort it out how they see fit. It works for online registrations but not all in-shop systems as they filter on [a-z A-Z 0-9 .-_] (and probably one or two other characters.
One problem with hassling companies who "pass on your details" is that permission for this is often hidden in the terms and conditions. Do you ever read those fully? I don't.