Investigating junk mail

[Deleted User] · 07/12/10 - 09:29

When checking my mail on my hotmail account this morning I had 14 messages in my junk box. I sometimes get one or two, but 14 is an awful lot more than usual. I didn't read any messages but could tell from the email addresses that they were all nonsense, so deleted them.

Fast forward 30 minutes, I check my emails again to find another 8 gibberish junk mails. I deleted them, left my hotmail open and low and behold another three have appeared in the last five minutes.

I don't hand out my email address willy nilly, but plenty of websites have hold of it. I expect to receive the odd junk mail as I use my email address for things like restaurant vouchers, and job hunting websites, but today there's all of a sudden been this surge which is worrying me.

Is there any way I can go about investigating where they're coming from, so I can possibly delete my information from whichever naughty site has my details? Thanks.

davidmcn · 07/12/10 - 09:33

Tischlampe wrote: »

Is there any way I can go about investigating where they're coming from, so I can possibly delete my information from whichever naughty site has my details? Thanks.

Not a chance.

How good is the spam filter on Hotmail? If it's sending most of the spam into the spam folder, and not sending any genuine mail that way, I would just leave it to get on with the job. I find the filter on Googlemail very good.

[Deleted User] · 07/12/10 - 09:38

I generally find the SPAM filter very good. Occaisonally "safe" mail gets sent there, but I find rarely that SPAM mail ends up in my inbox.

chrisjr · 07/12/10 - 09:39

It is a total waste of time trying to track down junk e-mail. Even bigger waste of time trying to get yourself removed from any mailing list etc.

Think about it for a second. The senders of this garbage are not in the slightest bit interested in who they send it to. So do you really think that if you sent them a nice polite e-mail asking to be taken off their list that they would take even the slightest bit of notice?

If however you could identify them in person and send a couple of large gentlemen round to threaten to roast their kids over a hot fire till they gave up that might get their attention!

[Deleted User] · 07/12/10 - 09:41

I'm more worried about the sudden surge in junk mail rather than the junk itself. Apart from a few Amazon purchases I can't think of anything recently where I've given my email address. I'm happy to just keep getting rid, but I'm curious if anything.

chrisjr · 07/12/10 - 09:53

There was I thinking I was getting less junk mail with less than 30 items in my junk folder when I've looked recently.

You don't need to have given your e-mail address to anyone. I have a domain based personal e-mail and it gets junk addressed to users like "admin" that I have never ever used. So some of it must simply be randomly generated addresses, some of which will score a hit.

chuzhuchiche · 07/12/10 - 11:08

I second those who are advising you that it is a waste of time worrying about it.

My employer dictates that our email addresses are on our website and that means my spam folder typically has 200-300 messages a day. Over the weekend, probably 400-500 messages arrive in it.

Once they've got your email they will keep bombarding you. In my experience hotmail is pretty good for keeping stuff out, gmail less so. The spammers have a range of ways of acquiring your address from making up addresses (as others have stated) to harvesting from web-sites and I do believe a few years ago an employee of one of the big ISPs (AOL, possibly) was found to have sold a whole pile of addresses. Spam is not worth worrying about (on a personal level) just report it to your email acccount provider so they can tweak their filters.

[Deleted User] · 07/12/10 - 11:21

Thanks for the advice everyone. I've had another 7 junk emails in the past hour, but I guess I should be grateful that's 393 less than 400!

I'll just have to ignore and leave my curiosity hanging on this one!

Lippincote · 07/12/10 - 11:40

I had an Orange address and never had any spam for the first couple of years, then was suddenly inundated, never worked out why. In the end I was getting about 100 junk mails a week, and the spam filter was useless. All my genuine mail was swamped and the address became unusable.

I opened a new address with fastmail and moved all my genuine stuff over there. Have had that address now for nearly two years and not a single piece of junk mail.

Mitten Kitten · 07/12/10 - 12:11

I have two hotmail accounts. One I use for personal and business, the other, I use for when various websites want you to sign in. In my personal one, I hardly get anything. In the other, I constantly get the ones warning me my account is being suspended from banks I have no links with. I click on 'mark as' and then 'spam'. They still get put into my junk folder, but I guess the senders keep changing their email addresses so as fast as you get rid of them, new ones appear.

WokStation · 07/12/10 - 12:18

I bet you opened one of them to have a look...

Often they'll include remotely-hosted images or even little snippets of code to ping a server, which then confirms that someone at your email address has viewed the email. This then gets your address marked as "live" and invites more spam.

It's also why you should NEVER click on the "remove me from your mailing list" links on spam emails.

Dunno if you can do this in the Hotmail web-client, but when spam shows up in my Pop3 email I click "view source" in Thunderbird rather than open the email itself - that way I can read the content without the email being opened.

Lippincote · 07/12/10 - 12:31

I never opened any of my junk mail. It's always obvious what they are from the title and sender, and I used to batch delete them without viewing. Yet still they multiplied.

[Deleted User] · 07/12/10 - 13:02

I've had my hotmail account for years and years. Probably since around 04. Like I said, I've always had one or two bits of Junk-mail, but suddenly today it's surged significantly.

I just had an email entitled "Wanna have some fun?" from someone called Mildred!!! :eek:!

danleto · 07/12/10 - 17:09

I've got 160 junk messages where as last week and years before I never got any something is up with Hotmail me thinks.

kookiethekat · 07/12/10 - 17:18

I have also found a surge in junk mail in the last week or so, and I have not joined anything new.

I checked my email before bed, when I woke up I had 47 emails in my junk folder.

[Deleted User] · 07/12/10 - 18:37

chuzhuchiche wrote: »

. . . In my experience hotmail is pretty good for keeping stuff out, gmail less so. . .

Seems to be different for different people - I tend to find it the other way around - my gmail account has no spam going into my inbox, yet my mum's hotmail account gets spammed all the time (and yes, she does have the junk filters turned on...) (having said that, it's not as bad recently as it has been in the past, now I know where it's going instead!)

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