Is everyone getting more Gmail Spam?

[Lose Remerswaal]

Used to be I'd get fewer than 3 or 4 new messages per day in spam. Been about double that this year. Woke up to 15 in my box this AM, and have cleared out another 8 since then.

I do occasionally get legit stuff there, so I want to review before deleting. That's easier when it's a smaller amount to skim.

It's all "Provide Auto" and "Welcome to Fidelity Life" "ADT" and things like that. Filters on those words to automatically delete don't seem to detect them.

Any tips on how to reduce?

 

[DJnVa]

I've been getting a fair amount recently. What's interesting is they show as going to weird AOL email addresses and not my gmail account. They show the recipient as ASHLIEgf@aol.com and ASHLIEc0@aol.com and things like that. Usually 2 addresses at a time.

 

[glennhoffmania]

For a while I was getting a lot but I was able to unsubscribe and/or block some of the repeat offenders. It's almost as if someone signed me up for some email subscriptions, which I suppose is also possible. After doing the cleaning and blocking process I now only get one or two per day.

 

[Lose Remerswaal]

These aren't subscriptions, they come from addresses with random letters and numbers hoping I am an idiot who clicks on CLAIM YOUR PRIZE links.

 

[PedroSpecialK]

These are likely DKIM replay attacks, we've been seeing these for 8-10 months now. Spammers get access to an email service provider like MailChimp (or my current employer) that allows anyone to send a message, spammers then send a benign message through it (this leverages the reputation of that provider's network to get into Gmail and other inboxes). The spammers finally modify the content of that message to be malicious, and forward it ad nauseum to consumer inboxes.

This exposes a vulnerability in the DKIM framework, since that was intentionally designed to separate senders from messages and create a notion of a 'trusted' sender, assuming the DKIM signature is present -- which it is for forwarded messages. It's a messy, complex problem but the graybeards of the email world are working on solutions.

 

[Scott Cooper's Grand Slam]

Just in case there are any current or prospective Apple users out there, Hide My Email is one of my favorite features. It automatically creates single-purpose (meaning they're used for one email per one site/service, not that the email automatically dies after being used once), throwaway emails that forward to an email of your choice (i.e., your main Gmail account). This makes it easy to turn off email addresses once you find they're recieving spam, so that they never reach your gmail inbox.

 

[Reverend]

I got some weird email from Google telling me how to fend off unsolicited Google Calendar spam. I haven’t been getting any, but it possibly suggests that something may be up.

 

[Lose Remerswaal]

I got some weird email from Google telling me how to fend off unsolicited Google Calendar spam. I haven’t been getting any, but it possibly suggests that something may be up.

I got that today, too. I am sure they are monitoring my keystrokes and that is how this came about

 

[SumnerH]

No.

 

[tonyandpals]

I've got an increase in "Thank you for your purchase" type emails where it looks like I spent $500 at Kohl's or bought a MacBook. Likely with hopes of me clicking on a link and passing on my credentials. Also a few fake paypal emails saying they received my payment of $$$ and when I log in to paypal I have a request for the same amount waiting there. Paypal has been pretty good about it as by the time I go in to view to request I can't pull up any details on it, as it's likely been flagged on their end as suspicious.

 

[24JoshuaPoint]

I was getting more passing thru the spam filter a few months ago but that has stopped. I only get maybe one in a thousand actual non spam messages that hits my spam folder so i'm never in there.

 

[ShaneTrot]

Are you telling me this is not real?

 

[Lose Remerswaal]

I *wish* I got those! All of mine pretend to be for insurance or YOU'RE A WINNER or from Walmart and similar

 

[SocrManiac]

Sharp increase here as well. Most should be easily caught.

 

[Lose Remerswaal]

33 more in the past 14 hours.

 

[Pitt the Elder]

33 more in the past 14 hours.

Ha, I literally just got one as I was reading this thread, a "You have been chosen!" email from Ace Hardware. A lot of these are getting by my spam filters, which is surprising to me because they're so obviously spam and phishing attempts. I would have expected Google to be better at catching these.

 

[Pitt the Elder]

Double post

 

[Van Everyman]

Same here. What’s weird is that this stuff is being delivered to my phone notifications (I imagine spam has always been delivered but quarantined and hidden).

 

[amlothi]

Also a ton of reports that Hotmail/Outlook filtering is not working for people. I wonder whether the spammers have found some new way that evades filters.

 

[j44thor]

Also a ton of reports that Hotmail/Outlook filtering is not working for people. I wonder whether the spammers have found some new way that evades filters.

Yes my 20+yr old Hotmail account is suddenly being flooded with spam, more today than in the last 20yrs combined, in my "focused" inbox. I suspect they use a common 3rd party tool that is suddenly failing. Doubt the spammers suddenly figured something out, they are too lazy.

 

[Ferm Sheller]

I had a huge influx of spam emails recently, including a seemingly unending deluge yesterday, but it seems to have stopped in the past 16 hours or so.

 

[Lose Remerswaal]

51 between monday AM and last night. 33 overnight last night . 4 in the past hour. And I get 3-4 legit important emails that get routed to spam each week, so I do need to review what’s in there, at least the sender name.

 

[Lose Remerswaal]

No relief. 60-80/day

Can’t even find any articles that this is widespread

 

[Murderer's Crow]

I've mostly solved the problem, I have created some really great auto-delete filters. For example, I was getting tons of emails that had key words in the subjects like CLAIM PRIZE or whatever and I just add them to the filter every time I see a trend. Now I get maybe 3-5 a week.

If you need help setting up a filter I can screenshot mine from my laptop later. It really helps.

 

[Murderer's Crow]

Here’s an example for my work email which gets wayyyy less spam.

 

[Lose Remerswaal]

I will give those a shot. We are heading east right now so I am on mobile for the next while.

 

[savage362]

I got slammed with this a year or 2 ago. After checking the email headers I found that almost all of the spam emails were originating or at least passing through AWS servers so I started forwarding every single one to the three AWS abuse email addresses I could find and also reporting every single one as Phishing to Google. I didn't have high hopes but there was a small sliver of hope that enough of them would somehow get in front of a real person for review or trigger some type of mechanism on Google or AWS to prevent more spam emails from getting through. Eventually they slowed and now I'm usually getting 2-5, sometimes up to 10 spam emails per day. None of them appear to be coming through AWS anymore but there are some domains and IPs that repeatedly appear on these things for me.

 

[Nick Kaufman]

I switched from Win 7 to Win 10 a couple of weeks ago and maybe it was a coincidence, but one of my old AOL accounts just got slammed with spam with the outlook filters I had before doing nothing.

At some point, I set the filters to only allow mails from a safe senders' list; then i marked most of the common email addresses as junk, then I repeated that process on my iphone. The insane volume seems to have died down. At its peak I might have been getting close to 100 spam emails per day, the past couple of days it's around 10 or so.

I can't tell if any of the things I tried made a difference or the spammer got busted or something, but I am glad that things are quieter for now.