I'm suddenly getting more spam emails.
Should I be worried?
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Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
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Let's get right to the question.
"I recently began receiving 100 plus spam emails per day, mostly sexual related.
Gmail is doing a good job sending them to spam.
I would assume someone has gotten my email address that I wish hadn't.
Should I be concerned about them having more than just my email address?
No other obvious sign of phishing, etc."
Now, in general, you don't need to worry.
Unless, of course,
you're seeing other suspicious activity beyond just getting spam.
This happens all the time to all of us.
You don't even have to have a particularly active account.
All you need to have is an account and you'll start getting spam.
Let's have a quick look at one of my example accounts.
This is askleoexample@hotmail.com.
You'll see that the inbox itself is completely empty.
But if I take a look at my folders, you can see I've got a thousand pieces
of junk of there. That is at least within the last month.
It's quite a few per day.
If I go in there, you can see it's.
The standard scams and spam.
And who knows what all. This stuff? That's all worth ignoring.
But there's just hundreds and hundreds of spam emails here.
Like I said, we we all get it.
If you have an email account,
you're either getting spam or you're going to be getting spam.
It's kind of the way the email ecosystem works.
Now, one of the things I want to address
you've indicated that your spam is getting routed to the spam folder by Gmail.
That's fantastic.
That is the system working as it should.
There's nothing you could do to stop the flood of spam.
All you can do is decide how you're going to manage it.
And a spam filter,
a good spam filter that automatically and correctly the majority of the time
identifies spam and places it into a special folder,
usually called either spam or as we've seen here in Hotmail Junk,
it will save you the need of actually ever having to even see the spam.
Those thousand spam messages that I just
scrolled through, probably the first time I've seen most of them.
A few show up in my inbox, and that's kind of sort of to be expected.
One of the measures of a good quality spam folder is how many false negatives.
In other words, how many spam actually
make it into your inbox and how many false positives or how many
legitimate emails make it into the spam folder.
Outlook.
It's okay.
It has a varying success rate.
It really does require some amount of attention.
It's a filter that generally will err on the side of caution.
And by that I mean, it will let spam into your inbox
rather than running the risk of falsely marking something as spam.
Gmail seems to be the best spam filter out there so far that I've seen. It does
a really good job of identifying spam and throwing it into the spam folder so
that I rarely, if ever take the time to look at my spam.
There's simply no need.
Like I said, that's the system working as it should, whether you get one spam a day
or a thousand spams a day, if it all ends up in your spam folder, that's okay.
That's the way it should be. If it's not,
if it is not showing up in your spam folder.
If it is, if you are getting 1000 spams
every day in your inbox, you need to find a different solution for spam management.
That usually means switching to a provider with a better spam filter.
Gmail seems to be the best free one.
I have to point out again, you cannot stop spam.
Anyone can send you spam.
If they know your email address, they can send you an email.
That means spammers are going to send you email.
There's really nothing to prevent that from happening.
All you can do is manage it as it arrives with a good spam filter.
So why do we suddenly get these floods?
I've seen them myself.
One day I'll get 20 spam, and then for the next three or four days I
might get 30 or 40 or 100 spam with no real apparent rhyme or reason to it.
I've got a couple of theories.
One is that a new breach has somehow made its way into the spammers circles.
By that, I mean,
one of the breaches that you may or perhaps may not have yet heard of has
become public information for spammers to use.
They immediately then
grab the new list of email addresses that they've discovered in the breach,
which probably includes yours and mine, and then start spamming it aggressively.
Sometimes that is one reason you might suddenly see a large flood.
Another is that honestly, spam,
which used to be kind of a random hit or mess low level kind of activity,
has kind of turned into its own business, its own little cottage industry.
And as a result, spammers run
I'll just call it campaigns.
They might have contracts with people
for whom they are sending these emails out,
and they may periodically be sending large batches of spam on behalf of some of these
companies that are trying to tell you stuff.
It is another reason that you might end up
seeing spam come in waves. But waves themselves,
spam itself, is honestly not really something to worry about.
It's something to manage.
But no matter how much you get and how much it gets managed properly,
spam in and of itself does not indicate a security issue for you.
It does not indicate anything is really at risk.
Someone knows your email address.
Many people do.
It's just not an issue.
What is an issue?
If you also start seeing other things happening?
If you do see suspicious sign ins to your own email account.
If you do see activity on your credit card
that you don't expect, if accounts start getting opened in your
name, then it might be time to take further action.
Pay closer attention to what else might be happening in your digital world.
That could mean anything.
Anything from credit monitoring services
to simply changing accounts or keeping a very close eye on your credit card.
Exactly what to do.
Well, that'll depend on exactly what suspicious activity you see.
But the good news here, the real takeaway here is that Spam
annoying as it can be, is generally not something to worry about.
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I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com.