Where Have All the Spammers Gone?

[socaltek]

It started about 15 months ago; I started getting between 25-30 spam posted daily to my e-mail spam folder. I never opened them. I tried to ignore them for a while but the spams kept on coming. I then tried to erase them every morning, but again there was no noticeable reduction in the frequency of spams. Finally, I decided to change my email but having had that address close to three decades, I had to venture with prudence lest I miss an email from a long lost friend.

Suddenly, Out of nowhere, they stopped! I'd like to take credit for forcing the culprits to mend their evil ways (LOL) but I feel there may have another event that stopped the spams. Does anyone know of a recent crack-down on 'boiler room operations.'

[v_v]

socaltek,

While I cannot speak for your specific situation, I have noticed that in the last month or so two of my email addresses are getting spammed everyday with about 10 messages each.  This is with the two United Online email systems, Juno and Netzero.  This has happened before and it continues for maybe a couple of months or so or maybe a little longer.  But then it abruptly stops---until the next time.  Next time could be 6 months later, a year, or even longer.  But there usually is an intense cycle and then it stops.  I report all of these to the spam folder and I will say that Juno and Netzero are fairly good with filtering out most spam.  But somehow these get through.

I have NOT changed my email addresses because of this for like yourself I have had them for a long time.  At the present moment there may not be a universal fix for this kind of spam.  Given the patterns that I have seen there are too many ways that an email address could be found, if not by breaking into someone's email address book or history (not necessarily yours but perhaps those of some correspondents) or by simply using computer-generated name possibilities for all email services, etc.

While I find it a nuisance, at this volume it is not crippling.  Now maybe if there were 50-100 everyday I would have to take other actions.  But from 10-30 or so I have not found it to be a significant problem.  The spams are easily recognizable and they are usually clustered together or contiguous so reporting them to the spam folder is not that time-consuming.

All in all I have just accepted this as part of the environment for using email, just like traffic is a part of driving and junk mail is a part of the postal mail system.

So no good news, just another experience to add to the pot!

[Corrine]

You might want to check your email address(es) at Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach.

[plodr]

My Yahoo spam has stopped in the past month. And yes, that address appears on the internet from way, way back.  Yahoo and AOL was sold by Verizon so I wonder if they finally started using spam filters.
Juno has started getting spam so each time, without opening, I click block the address. Juno keeps blocks in order of time not alphabetical so from time to time I go in and remove some of the older blocks at the top of the list.

Gmail seems to be the only email service that has figured out what is spam and not even send it my way. I do get about 1 spam, indicated as such, in perhaps a month. I can live with that.

[socaltek]

It was too good to last! Going from around 30 spams a day to zero, was like a dream come true. But it appears the spammers just took a holiday. Earlier in he week, my Hotmail account was averaging around 2 spams per day but it has slowly been increasing and yesterday I had 9. Still it's manageable but I'm not happy with the direction it's going! In this case, the trend is my enemy.

Yes, when i checked my e-mail address if I've been pawned. The answer was "pawned in 5 data breaches but no pastes."