Spam Out Of Control Version 3.8.3.2965

[CarpenterMate]

Hi Gang

I use Windows 7 Pro on a Desktop - I use Both Malwarebytes and Microsoft Essentials. I use Thunderbird for a 3rd party Email provider with multiple accounts. Sometime ago I was hit by vivicious amount of Spam totallying 30 or more a day party. I changed all my passwords (for all accounts) to extremely secure choices and limited use of the affected account. However 10 months later the original 'AFFECTED' account continues to get pounded as spam gets past the spam filter in Thunderbird. In the past the only way I was able to deal with this was to set parameters to immediately DELETE ALL email regardless of what it was.....

I'm considering another SPAM filter?

Any ideas?

Thank You   

[Malwarebytes]

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[exile360]

Greetings,

Unfortunately spam can be difficult to deal with as it only requires that they have your email address to send spam to; they don't need your password or any other info.  It's likely that some site or service you signed up for sold or freely provided your email address to a third party advertiser/marketer along with everyone else who signed up there, and these spam messages are the result.  Short of creating a new email address and stopping use of the one being spammed, I don't know of any surefire way to eliminate it.  Obviously reporting each spam message to your email provider by marking them as spam may help a bit eventually, however there is no guarantee that it will eliminate all of it as spammers are pretty clever and will use many different sources to send the messages, but hopefully the content of the messages is generic enough that your email provider's spam filter can heuristically block it all after it has been trained by having enough of the messages reported.

Also, if the spam is from a legitimate marketing company and not malicious/a scam, you could seek out an unsubscribe option to get off of their mailing list if they provide one within the messages, though that is a bit of a risk as it provides confirmation that your email address is active/in-use which would help them if they are malicious.  If you know the source of the messages, like a site you signed up at or an online store you purchased from then unsubscribing should be perfectly safe and should stop the messages.

You can also seek out info on the Malwarebytes Labs blog which is written by the Malwarebytes Research team.  I did a search for the word 'spam' and got plenty of results showing articles and info that may prove useful to you.  You can view the results here or you can do a search on your own or explore the blog from its homepage here.

[CarpenterMate]

"if the content of the messages is generic enough your email provider's spam filter can heuristically block it all"

Apparently that's asking too much - GMail's Spam Filter has been BUSTED, decoded, infiltrated, broken, ineffective, useless - my last resort is to DELETE this specific account (as this is not happening to the same extent) to my other accounts ... 😢

[exile360]

That's a real bummer, I'm sorry to hear that.  My GMail account is usually pretty good about filtering most of the junk out, but admittedly I do give out my GMail address as little as possible, and usually either use a bogus address if it's required (and assuming they don't require verification; though unfortunately most sites/services do these days), or I'll use my Yahoo address instead which seems to also be pretty good about catching the unwanted junk/spam.

If you can determine the source of the spam that could definitely help you to avoid it in the future.  Basically try and determine around when it started coming in and figure out what the most recent site/service etc. you signed up for using that account was at the time or who you gave the address to (it could also be that someone you know was infected with malware and your address was snagged from their address book and the bad guys are now spamming everyone whose address they've retrieved that way).  Of course another possibility is that one of the countless data breaches that have taken place over the past several years resulted in the bad guys getting your address among the others that were stored in one of the online databases they stole and that's where it's coming from.

Either way, I hope that you are successful in avoiding the spam in the future; I know how frustrating it can be when you just want to read your messages only to be greeted with an inbox full of spam.

[CarpenterMate]

Thank you exile360,  (as one of Malwarebytes experts) its nice to get replies from you!

[exile360]

You're welcome, I'm just sorry I couldn't do more to help.

[Pierre75]

@CarpenterMateThere is a way around your problem. I have Mailwasher installed marketed by Firetrust in New Zealand. I helped to develop that software from scratch and am still using it. I am NOT involved with the company but volunteered my services back in 2001.

Hopefully that will solve your problems with spam.