AnimalCrossingPerson
Please respect GDPR
Alright, so through my private email address I've been receiving spam mail for a while. I mean, it's an @hotmail.co.uk address and Hotmail (or Outlook these days) is kind of notorious for receiving spam. For some reason, my public casual businessy address isn't on any of these spam lists. It's run by Zoho through a custom domain.
Anyway, it's been getting worse and worse over time as my address gets shared across more spam mail lists and I'm now at the stage of something like 300 spam emails per week. I mean, most of it goes to the junk mail folder but that makes false-positives harder to find and when you get that much mail, some of it just doesn't get caught by the filter.
Over time, it has slowly begun shifting from car/life insurance to weight loss and now to dating/porn. I'm kind of worried as to what they'll move onto next. Drugs? The "y0u have w0n ?5oo t0 spend at M0rris0ns" emails have always been there. I don't go entering my email address into any sites with the stuff listed above nor do I go to anything with those topics particularly. No clue at all what their obsession is with Morrisons either - I don't go there or show any interest.
Here's what I've learnt so far:
If anyone wants my address to dig deeper, I'll be happy to share the address via a private message. It gets used for pretty much anything so I don't panic when keying it into WordPress blogs or whatever. So yeah, it's been punched into a lot of websites, but nothing related to the types of emails I'm receiving.
It is very unlikely I have any sort of spyware since I use Linux and this is actually the only weird thing happening.
Migrating to a different address for personal use wouldn't be too much of a pain since I don't communicate with too many people via that email address, mostly just family, but this account would have to stay open since one account for each website I'm registered with is using that address. This includes casual stuff such as this website and more sensitive stuff such as my main bank account and whatnot.
Um... so, asides from attempting to abandon that address, is there any real way to stop them? This has got to the stage where I'd happily call it illegal but can't be arsed taking legal action since email spam is the norm.
At least Russian women and my neighbours are only trying to share their photos through emails and not shoving them through my home's letterbox... Man, that would be a lot of envelopes!
Yep, gotta end this on a lighthearted note.
Anyway, it's been getting worse and worse over time as my address gets shared across more spam mail lists and I'm now at the stage of something like 300 spam emails per week. I mean, most of it goes to the junk mail folder but that makes false-positives harder to find and when you get that much mail, some of it just doesn't get caught by the filter.
Over time, it has slowly begun shifting from car/life insurance to weight loss and now to dating/porn. I'm kind of worried as to what they'll move onto next. Drugs? The "y0u have w0n ?5oo t0 spend at M0rris0ns" emails have always been there. I don't go entering my email address into any sites with the stuff listed above nor do I go to anything with those topics particularly. No clue at all what their obsession is with Morrisons either - I don't go there or show any interest.
Here's what I've learnt so far:
- They do not know my name - I'll always be referred to by the part of my address before the @.
- They often use big colourful letters (usually red or blue) and images hosted externally.
- I've had both spam targeted at US and UK citizens. I live in the UK.
- Google returns no search results for my address when using quotation marks, though there is some stuff such as a Twitter account with the same name as in the address before the @. Perhaps I'm not the intended recipient?
- Clicking the "unsubscribe" buttons caused me to receive on average an email a minute for a very short time.
- All the email addresses are just long strings of random numbers and letters, both before and after the @.
- Since emojis have been hip, they've started using those. Literally all emails with an emoji in the subject line are spam.
If anyone wants my address to dig deeper, I'll be happy to share the address via a private message. It gets used for pretty much anything so I don't panic when keying it into WordPress blogs or whatever. So yeah, it's been punched into a lot of websites, but nothing related to the types of emails I'm receiving.
It is very unlikely I have any sort of spyware since I use Linux and this is actually the only weird thing happening.
Migrating to a different address for personal use wouldn't be too much of a pain since I don't communicate with too many people via that email address, mostly just family, but this account would have to stay open since one account for each website I'm registered with is using that address. This includes casual stuff such as this website and more sensitive stuff such as my main bank account and whatnot.
Um... so, asides from attempting to abandon that address, is there any real way to stop them? This has got to the stage where I'd happily call it illegal but can't be arsed taking legal action since email spam is the norm.
At least Russian women and my neighbours are only trying to share their photos through emails and not shoving them through my home's letterbox... Man, that would be a lot of envelopes!
Yep, gotta end this on a lighthearted note.
