70,000 spam Emails a day ?

Les McLean

Les McLean

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Luckily not me, but a friend has been getting around 70,000 spam Emails a day on his apple icloud Email.
He's been onto Apple, and I think at the end of the day, he'll probably have to change his Email address.
The reason for posting this is not to look for a solution (as I don't think there is an easy fix) but ask how this can happen.
I know if your Email address is in the public domain, you can get spam Emails, I do on my public Email, but maybe 3 or 4 a day, which is manageable, but 70,0000?
 
He doesn't think it's been given out to anyone Neil, but (and it's probably a big but) his teenage son could be the culprit, but even so to get this tsunami of spam is a bit extreme (or is it?)
 
damn, never heard of anyone ever getting that many emails.... like ever.... it works out like 49 emails per minute (70000/24/60=48.6)???
 
Les McLean said:
He doesn't think it's been given out to anyone Neil, but (and it's probably a big but) his teenage son could be the culprit, but even so to get this tsunami of spam is a bit extreme (or is it?)
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it is a large amount, but not hard to completely ruin a mailbox with such volumes. takes probably less than a minute for a bot to share an email to many databases.
 
Out of interest, are the emails been directed to the spam folder?
 
afasoas said:
Out of interest, are the emails been directed to the spam folder?
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Roughly 20,000 Emails, and 50,000 to the spam(Junk) folder
 
WOW and I thought I got a lot at around 5000pcm !!!

I use gmail though and I rarely get spam into my Inbox, gmail's spam folder is great for mopping up the crap, if changing emails maybe he could try gmail - he can then tell gmail to reply from his 'old' email address and that might help lessen any spam :)

Dave
 
I've not had that many, but I've had a couple of instances where I get as multitude of returned e-mail notices - the mail undeliverable message. I'm talking about 10 per minute. Soon gets on my wick!

Spoke to ISP and the only sugestion was to change my password. That worked. Twice I've had to do it.Was told that the spammers get my e-mail addres from somewhere, or even just guess at it. Then they send out millions of spams, and hope that someone replies. Of course the reply doesn't come anywhere near me. All I get is the rejections from false addresses.

Has your mate tried changing his password?
 
mickledore said:
I've not had that many, but I've had a couple of instances where I get as multitude of returned e-mail notices - the mail undeliverable message. I'm talking about 10 per minute. Soon gets on my wick!

Spoke to ISP and the only sugestion was to change my password. That worked. Twice I've had to do it.Was told that the spammers get my e-mail addres from somewhere, or even just guess at it. Then they send out millions of spams, and hope that someone replies. Of course the reply doesn't come anywhere near me. All I get is the rejections from false addresses.

Has your mate tried changing his password?
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Yes, that was one of the first things he did.
 
I've had the same email address for at least 15 years now so must be on quite a lot of lists I don't want to be. I was getting between 300-500 spam messages a day up until around 2 years ago, when I moved the domain to gmail, and since then, I very very rarely end up with any spam in my inbox at all, and the overall volume hitting the spam folder has reduced to 40-50 a day. Google's spam filtering is excellent!

To be getting 70,000 though is a real targeted effort - we used to see that volume or higher daily across our work domain when someone was making a concerted effort (again, I'm talking some years ago now, and all picked up by the spam appliance). Is your friend on a single email address or does he have a whole domain forwarded to one mailbox?
 
mickledore said:
I've not had that many, but I've had a couple of instances where I get as multitude of returned e-mail notices - the mail undeliverable message. I'm talking about 10 per minute. Soon gets on my wick!

Spoke to ISP and the only sugestion was to change my password. That worked. Twice I've had to do it.Was told that the spammers get my e-mail addres from somewhere, or even just guess at it. Then they send out millions of spams, and hope that someone replies. Of course the reply doesn't come anywhere near me. All I get is the rejections from false addresses.

Has your mate tried changing his password?
Click to expand...


In most instances, these bounce emails are usually the result of emails sent by senders who have spoofed your email address, rather than email's that have been sent from your account/mail server. Mail servers should be configured with SPF records and DKIM to prevent email address spoofing. However, it doesn't actually stop the spoofing, it helps receiving mail servers identify whether or not the email has come a legitimate source. If the email has come from a server that isn't a permitted sender or has no DKIM signature/an invalid DKIM signature, then it may deliver/spam/junk the email depending on how it's been configured.

It's also possible for email servers to be configured so that they reject emails sourced from black listed IP addresses. This should also cut out a lot of spam.

I'm in the process of moving everything I can away from Gmail, in light of: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news...address-is-now-for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder
 
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afasoas said:
I'm in the process of moving everything I can away from Gmail, in light of: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news...address-is-now-for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder
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Why? Aside from the sensationalised headline, the service only works if the retailer already has your email address, and the customer won't see any more ads than they do already - all they see are adds from the business targeted to them if they are using a google service that displays adds (as opposed to adds from anyone, which is what they see at the moment).
 
Furtim said:
I've had the same email address for at least 15 years now so must be on quite a lot of lists I don't want to be. I was getting between 300-500 spam messages a day up until around 2 years ago, when I moved the domain to gmail, and since then, I very very rarely end up with any spam in my inbox at all, and the overall volume hitting the spam folder has reduced to 40-50 a day. Google's spam filtering is excellent!

To be getting 70,000 though is a real targeted effort - we used to see that volume or higher daily across our work domain when someone was making a concerted effort (again, I'm talking some years ago now, and all picked up by the spam appliance). Is your friend on a single email address or does he have a whole domain forwarded to one mailbox?
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It's a single Email address{*******@icloud.com), he's had to shut down this Email address and using a Gmail one in the mean time. I don't think Apple engineers were able to help much when he contacted them, suggesting that it's probably something he (or his son) has done to cause this deluge of spam.
 
It's a bigger deal than that. I've read that it's any email address you use when making a purchase whilst signed into a Gmail account. And Google will make available indications of your shopping habits and browsing history to the retailer, albeit in an anonymised fashion.

Googles anonymisation of search engine data is pretty poor - as shown in the documentary "Terms and Conditions May Apply". And the number of times my card details have been compromised even though I am very careful where I use them, I'm not sure I want to share extra infornation with on-line retailers. They cant protect data well enough already.

In my view it's not the best interpretation of the DPA, although I ssuspect that doesnt apply as the data is stored outside the UK (most likely)
Call it the last straw, if you will. I should have ditched Google after they lobbied for the Enterprise Reform Bill which had far more implications to us as photographers...
 
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afasoas said:
. If the email has come from a server that isn't a permitted sender
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... it might well mean that an intermediate server has forwarded it to a different address, and SPF will break that forwarding. If the recipient doesn't control their mail server, and let's face it most people don't, they won't be able to configure it for sender rewrite (which is often a major faff to implement, even if they do control it), the sender may get a bounce stating their mail was undeliverable to an address that they didn't send it to in the first place.

SPF just adds layers of aggravation and potential for error to what is a very simple and elegant protocol, SMTP as defined in RFC 821.

On mail servers I administer I give SPF fails a 0.0 weighting when calculating a spam score. Spam is a constant battle, but a casualty shouldn't be erroneous delivery failures of legitimate mail.
 
Your talking about the "from adress"? Why would a relay/proxy/gateway server rewrite it?* And if it does, it should surely have it's own SPF record? I'll admit my experience is largely based on administrating my own mail servers.

*I'll admit I can think of some circumstances, companies segrating internal/external email

TBH presently I dont spam email that has failed SPF but then I dont receive a lot of spam. But in administrating my own mail server I have that choice. I know Gmail tends to spam emails that have failed SPF and even emails from domains for which there is no SPF setup.
 
Sounds like it is a targeted effort. Someone really doesn't like him. That is for normal spam levels way too much. Btw not that hard to get spam through the filter. It would be interesting to see a selection of messages in their raw format.
 
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