Nope, not the pork in a tin unfortunately.

Until recently I rarely got any junk email to my Hotmail account and what I did get went straight to my junk folder without me seeing them. In the last couple of weeks I’ve started getting around 5-10 emails a day to my inbox. All similar theme, Order Dispatched, Curry PC World Smeg Kettle Order, Failed Delivery, Order Query etc. I have bene blocking senders and moving to junk but they keep on coming.

To the best of my knowledge I’ve not done anything recently to make me more vulnerable to these. Any thoughts on why there has been such a rapid, and significant increase in volume?

Similar experience with my outlook address

Your email address has made it onto some list somewhere which is now being sold to the highest bidder all over the Internet. Probably either somewhere that you have typed it in has been hacked or they sold it and deliberately gave it away. Literally nothing you can do about it other than make sure your spam settings are configured to aggressively target spam/phishing etc. Or, change your email but it will happen again.

TBH Microsoft is pretty good at filtering them and if the webscrotes have found a loophole then MS will catch up in due course and it might get better again…

Same here – I’d say 80% of my work email inbox is now spam everyday.

Only one that seems to keep things in order is Gmail.

Could be as simple as the spammers managing to get one step ahead of the spam filters and messages that you normally wouldn’t see you now are.

If you were getting mail filtered to spam normally then your on those various spammers databases anyway*, so either the filter has changed or their efforts to evade the filter have improved.

*you dont need to have had your address shared, hacked or whatever with hotmail – there are so many hotmail users all a spammer needs to do is put any random string of character in front of @hotmail and the chances are thats someone’s address.

Same here, Hotmail junk filter isn’t great but it’s got progressively worse recently.

It can be random as someone spins up an operation or gets slapped down.
One key thing is never open the damn things. If you have html enabled then they can spot you are live and so target you more.

It’s the Russians…

If you have html enabled then they can spot you are live and so target you more.

I’ve always questioned this, surely it doesn’t cost them anything to send those extra e-mails.

The only usefulness is surely that they know it’s in use so they can re-sell it on a different list for a fraction of a pence more next time.

The latest one I’ve been getting is Google Docs spam. They add me (and thousands of others) as a shared user of the document.
The content is usually a load of Russian text so I’m probably on an intelligence watch list now lol.

The volume of spam to real email is astonishingly high. You might be seeing tens a day, but the real number that your provider silently disappears is likely to be hundreds or more.

It’ll just take a beat or two whilst the filters catch up.

The only usefulness is surely that they know it’s in use so they can re-sell it on a different list for a fraction of a pence more next time.

Apparently its worth more when selling it on (although how much someone could trust another spammer is an open question).
Having dealt with our own marketing teams and their love of checking whether emails have been read I always err on the side of caution though.