Spam

[Yvonne G]

I curious if anyone can answer this question for me. No big deal, I'm just curious about it:

I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird as my email account. But my IP is AT&T, who uses YAHOO. So my email really goes to the YAHOO account, then when I sign onto Thunderbird, Thunderbird accesses all the emails from YAHOO and puts them into my 'in' box. For all of these years, I have received at least 75 or 100 spam emails daily. I frequently delete any cookies. Then all of a sudden, about two months ago, I stopped getting any spams or only got 1 or 2 a day. Now, they've started coming once again. Yesterday I got 12 and today there were 32. Does anyone know how spammers get your address? I don't do much surfing on the internet, however, I do order things now and again online. And the spam messages that I get have absolutely NOTHING to do with the kinds of things I look at on the internet. They are usually pornographic in nature...the spams, not my surfing!!

Yvonne

 

[Josh]

Yvonne this might be because you used to have your email address as your username. There are "bots" that search the net for public email addresses and use them for spam.
Do you mark all your spam for the recycling bin? Thunderbird has an active spam filter that actually works pretty well.

 

[Yvonne G]

Yes, I mark them all as spam. And yes, Thunderbird does put them into the spam folder...but I used to get 75 to 100, then all of a sudden one day I got none and that lasted for a couple months, now I'm starting to get them again. I can't see that I've done anything anything different for it to be starting up again. So what you're saying is that somewhere I've used my email address for instance as a log in or user name and a bot has discovered it. Ok, I'll have to see if I can figure out where it is.

Thanks,

Yvonne

 

[Chucky]

There are programs out there that spammers use that will randomly go through every possible combination of emails so no matter if you get a brand new email, they'll find it within a couple of days. Once they find a good email, they pass it around to all the other spammers.

 

[Josh]

another option yvonne, is to make sure thunderbird is taking cues from SpamAssassin. under your account settings click on junk settings. then check "trust junk mail headers from [spamassassin]"
SpamAssassin provides data to thunderbird on known spam email and can really help in blocking out spam.

 

[Yvonne G]

Thank you everyone for your helpful hints. I have three email accounts, and I went into the "properties" on each of them and set my junk mail to to delete as soon as they're marked as junk. That should take care of Thunderbird picking them up from the YAHOO account. Which means that I might possibly miss a regular email that was wrongly marked as spam...but if its important they'll try again!!

Yvonne