Not just a couple spams here and there, once in a while. But, in the past month or so, suddenly I've been bombarded with tons of daily spams. Sure, I reported them as spams. But, that was zero help. Seems like att's spam filter is non-functioning at all, because the same damn spams keep returning. Plus, the new ones. What's the deal?

I've been seeing that and have wondered the same thing.
It does seem like spam isn't being filtered any longer.

I haven't seen anything about it anywhere.

I have a att.net email and only get a few spam messages a month.

I’ve used exclusively FastMail.com for email since 2002. It has a superb spam filter. For the past couple of years I only see 4 or 5 spam emails per month, all caught by the spam filter.

I pay $20 per year and consider it well worthwhile. There are other FastMail service options, including free.

You probably got a spam attack. I pissed off some liberal hippy apparently with my strong conservative views, next thing i know I'm getting thousands of spam emails every day, for like two months straight. It is down to a manageable 30-40 spam emails every day now.

I have sbcglobal.net and have been getting a lot of spam lately, too. Don't know why it's been getting through more than usual.

My address got sold to a spammer and I started getting 30 to 40 of the damn things per day from the same place. I eventually did a Domain Search Lookup on the email addy and found they have their service with a place called namecheap.com. I looked them up and they seemed like a legit internet service provider and there was an address to report spam, so I sent a list of all the emails I’d been getting from this spammer to the abuse at namecheap.com addy listed in the domain lookup. It took a week or two, but all the spam from that placed stopped. Worth looking at.

Since att.net e-mail is provided by Yahoo!, who knows what spam bots attack Yahoo! or how and why. I’ve mostly dumped my free AT&T provided email for something better for only a few dollars per month. Plus you get encryption and better spam filters.

It's not only AT&T. I have Charter and find myself in the same boat.

As far as chasing down the culprit, that would be WAY over my pay grade.

Bob

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:

There are other FastMail service options, including free.

Isn't FastMail discontinuing the free service?

^^^^^^
It appears that the free option is already gone.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/member.html

I hadn’t checked in years because I’ve been completely satisfied with my $20/year option, which I’ve had for more than a decade.

Every year, as my plan nears expiration, FastMail checks to see if my credit card on file with them is expired or not. Then they send me an email reporting that finding, advising an update if it’s not. If the CC isn’t expired, they state that they’ll soon charge my CC for renewal, unless I wish not to renew. FastMail is a premium, well managed service. They don’t sell your data.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
Not just a couple spams here and there, once in a while. But, in the past month or so, suddenly I've been bombarded with tons of daily spams. Sure, I reported them as spams. But, that was zero help.

I'm not surprised.

Hate to sound defeatist, but the reality is reporting spam email is probably a waste of your time.

Spammers move around so much, so quickly, and have become so adept at reformatting their spam to evade automation, that as soon as somebody takes action on spam reports the spammers have moved on.

I pursued manual spam reporting at work. Got colleagues to submit reports. Developed tools to process the spam reports into filters, which I could vet before putting in-place (people would sometimes report legitimate email as spam). Did the same for a server I ran for some friends running a business.

Did this for about two years. Gave it up. With all the man-hours people spent reporting spam and I spent processing those spam reports, it all stopped so little spam it simply wasn't worth the effort.

There are automated spam-trapping systems that rely on spam traps and heuristics that are effective, but manual spam-handling systems aren't so much.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
Seems like att's spam filter is non-functioning at all, because the same damn spams keep returning. Plus, the new ones. What's the deal?

Hard to say. It could be Yahoo! (that's who supplies email service for "AT&T" customers), which is not a healthy company, isn't doing such a great job any more. Processing of manual spam reports is very labour-intensive.

Or it could be they used to be subscribed to one of the automated blacklisting systems and decided they didn't want to pay for it any more.

Or it could just be incompetence.

It also could be that all-of-a-sudden your email address has ended-up on a bunch of "Buy A Bazillion Validated Opted-In Email Addresses For Only $259" lists.

Have you done anything to annoy a knowledgeable tech geek, lately? A favourite trick of unethical IT people is, when somebody annoys them, see to it their email address ends-up on those kinds of lists. It's disappointingly easy to accomplish.

Wish I had a solution, or at least a solid answer for you, Q.

As an aside: This problem could be mitigated. But the people responsible for setting Internet standards, the people who send "legitimate" bulk email, and the people who consult for the bulk emailers are not interested in solving it. Those latter two groups are specifically interested in not solving it. (Though they will claim otherwise.)