How to Handle Junk Mail With Spoofed sender Address?

Topic

New Reply

We use Outlook.Live.com (Microsoft’s web-based email). Generally, it works well.

Some time ago my email address there was “harvested” from some website or other and sold to a spammer. I have limited my Inbox to senders who are in my Contacts list. This results in the spam being sent to my Junk folder. So far, so good.

I have created Rules to try and have the spam that arrives every day with the same subject line or, (different rule) even just one designated

word in the subject line to be automatically Deleted, but it doesn’t work. Don’t know why.

What I do know is that most of the spam arrives from a different spoofed sender address each time.

I dare not create a Rule to auto-Delete everything from the Junk folder because occasionally I may be in telephone contact with who needs to send me an email and, since they’re not in my contact list, the wanted email might get Deleted before I could move it to my Inbox.

Currently, I check / empty the Junk folder 2 or 3 times a day. Any suggestions on how to keep the 40 to 60 spam emails per day from piling up in Junk folder?

Reply | Quote

Replies

It can’t be done because the sender is different for each. Junk management is still largely manual.

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

Change your email address.

Then inform your legitimate contacts of the change.

Monitor original address until all incoming mail is “spoof mail” – then consider deleting mail box.

 

Reply | Quote

Thanks, guys. I was afraid your answers would be the ones you provided. I resigned myself a while back to viewing and bulk deleting the Junk mailbox two or three times a day. And, I just hate giving up my oldtime email address.

Main reason for posting the issue is that I was helping a friend who receives tons of junk mail each day at their iCloud.com address. In that case the junk mail is mostly unwanted daily newsletters and updates from legitimate sites which my somewhat naïve friend allowed to “update you with the latest etc., etc.”

iCloud email has a simple click-on-this-arrow-here to send an email to the Junk folder and all future emails from that source automatically go to Junk. Advantage: no need to return to all those websites and unsubscribe. Some newesletters have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page. My experience over many years is that such an option works about two-thirds of the time. So, we just went down the Inbox list for one day’s worth and, voila!, most of the unwanted stuff is gone never to return.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent my friend from letting it happen at other websites, haha.

again, thanks for your replies. Cheers!

Reply | Quote

All of those things are true. And having myself been down the road of this thought many times, I found that among the best options were to (1.) change the e-mail address, and (2.) subscribe to a challenge-and-response e-mail intermediary.

Whenever I assess new software, I first look for reviews. Over time I’ve found that the published reviews by once-reliable sites change, and one has to look thoughtfully at the site’s motivations for their reviews. E.g., PC Magazine had no quickly findable reviews of these things. In updating my own knowledge of potential spam filtering intermediaries just now, I found this review, “Best Email Spam Filter Services 2022“.

Human, who sports only naturally-occurring DNA ~ oneironaut ~ broadcaster

Reply | Quote