Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

[andydenyer]

Over the past few days, I have noticed an increasing number of quite obvious spam and scam emails getting though to my inbox.

As I say, these have all the clear hallmarks of spam and scam emails, so I am wondering why these are getting through BT's spam filters, or are they not operating correctly again?  I recall a similar incident earlier this year.

[andydenyer]

I seem to be receiving these on a daily basis now, always from gmail email addresses.  I don't want to block the gmail domain as I do have a few genuine contacts with gmail addresses.

What I don't understand is why these are getting through to my inbox, despite me reporting them as spam every time.

Which? magazine has highlighted this latest trend, so why is it taking so long for BT Mail to catch up with it and stop these emails from getting through?

https://conversation.which.co.uk/scams/mcafee-norton-antivirus-fake-phishing-email-warning/?utm_medi...

[PaddyB]

Hi @andydenyer,

Thank you for posting. I'm sorry if you've noticed and increase in Spam and scam emails. The scammer and spammers are always looking for ways to get around the Filters.

If you take a look at How to deal with spam in BT Email you'll find a few suggestion that could help.

Thanks,

Paddy

[PaddyB]

Hi @andydenyer,

Thank you for posting. We have noticed a increase in the amount of scam emails been sent. Unfortunately the scammers are also always developing new ways of getting around the filter and making their email look legitimate.

There is some really good advice in the Which link you posted, around keeping safe online. You can find some useful information from BT here -Protecting you from scams 

Thanks,

Paddy 

[andydenyer]

I understand that.  But, as I stated in my original post, these are obvious spam and scam emails with all the usual tell-tale signs such as sender's (alleged) email address (many are xxx@gmail.com where xxx is a complete random string of around 10-12 characters), subject titles ("URGENT - Your McAffee [sic] subscription is about to expire"), mis-spellings and grammatical errors etc., including those that Which? magazine have alerted members to:

 https://conversation.which.co.uk/scams/mcafee-norton-antivirus-fake-phishing-email-warning/

[Andy_N]

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@andydenyerwrote:

I understand that.  But, as I stated in my original post, these are obvious spam and scam emails with all the usual tell-tale signs such as sender's (alleged) email address (many are xxx@gmail.com where xxx is a complete random string of around 10-12 characters), subject titles ("URGENT - Your McAffee [sic] subscription is about to expire"), mis-spellings and grammatical errors etc., including those that Which? magazine have alerted members to:

 https://conversation.which.co.uk/scams/mcafee-norton-antivirus-fake-phishing-email-warning/

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What's easy for a human to see as obvious spam is far more difficult for a machine, especially when it needs to check billions of emails and not cause vast amounts of false positives.

People do make up weird email addresses, not least to help themselves get spammed! Mispelt words doesn't always mean it's spam - not everyone spells perfectly.

As has been said, spammers try all sorts of tricks to bypass anti-spam systems, but there are vast amounts that are stopped - and these systems will occassionaly fail, either because they have fallen behind in catching the new spam methods, or sometimes because the anti-spam engines might underperform due to the amount hitting it.

[LadyLouisa]

Me too! Also for Norton and more random things, thinking of ditching my long held email address it has gotten too bad lately.

[essjay]

I too have been subjected to an ever increasing, and most definitely unwanted, level of spam emails recently, and as has been highlighted a lot of them are now coming from spammers with Gmail addresses which make it extremely difficult to deal with effectively as I have friends and colleagues that have Gmail addresses which precludes me from blocking the domain. 

It seems the only way is to block the sender, but there are so many different user names I’m blocking around a dozen a day. This is really getting annoying now!!.

Surely BT’s tech dept have the ‘brains’ to combat this ongoing threat, or are they just not employing the right people?

[Andy_N]

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@essjaywrote:

I too have been subjected to an ever increasing, and most definitely unwanted, level of spam emails recently, and as has been highlighted a lot of them are now coming from spammers with Gmail addresses which make it extremely difficult to deal with effectively as I have friends and colleagues that have Gmail addresses which precludes me from blocking the domain. 

It seems the only way is to block the sender, but there are so many different user names I’m blocking around a dozen a day. This is really getting annoying now!!.

Surely BT’s tech dept have the ‘brains’ to combat this ongoing threat, or are they just not employing the right people?

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It doesn't work like that. The spam is not coming from gmail accounts, the spammers have spoofed the email addresses to pretend to come from those accounts.

They spoof different addresses each time, so blocking can effectively be pointless.

The spammers are always a step or two ahead of ISP anti-spam systems, so until these engines catch up - there can be a bow wave of spam before they get blocked when the systems learn the spam signatures.

[andydenyer]

Today I received an email in my inbox (NOT identified by BT as spam) allegedly from PayPal but was not from a PayPal email address - surely that should be a clear indicator?

Although, rather oddly, when I forwarded it to PayPal, they came back to me to advise that it didn't appear to be fraudulent, even though it contained a link for me to enter my account details, but when I hovered over it, I could see that it would have directed me to a website that also was nothing to do with PayPal!

When I contacted PayPal again about it (this time to a different department), they were able to confirm that they had not sent me any emails in the last 24 hours.  I expressed it was rather concerning that their security department could not see anything fraudulent about an email that came from a strange looking email address and contained a somewhat dodgy link for me to enter my account details (which I didn't, of course)!