Sudden Increase in Spam

[gg30340]

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@Kimberlin wrote:

Actually, there literally is such a thing as a spam free account if you're prepared to pay for it. I pay my £33 a year to a Swiss email provider and I get literally zero spam. I've had one spam email this year, I blocked it, reported it and it's never been seen again. Then again, and I promise I'm not perfect, but I read every email I get very carefully and I check every header on every email I receive. I learned the hard way from a constantly spammed Outlook email account. Never going there again.

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I have numerous free email accounts, ISP's email accounts and free email accounts such as gmail amongst others and it is very rare, so much so that I can not remember the last time I had a spam email in those accounts so it is possible to have a spam free email account without paying for it.

[Kimberlin]

I'll stick with my one email account which I'm more than happy paying for. There are of course many reasons why people have large numbers of different email accounts. I have two SIM's on my phone, one for personal, one for business, so it makes sense if one really does need more than one email account. I don't disagree that it's possible to have a virtually spam free account that is free to use. Choose carefully is all I'd say.

[gg30340]

It does not make any difference how many email accounts you have as each one is a stand alone account. It does however matter how and where you use them. 

Rather me listing information I found this on the Malwarebytes site 

There are several ways spammers can obtain your email address:

• Bots: Spammers use bots to find email addresses. Bots crawl the internet, checking websites, message boards, and public social media pages for your contact information.
• Subscriptions: If you signed up for a mailing list or promotion, your email address may have been sold to a spammer. Opening scam emails can also land your address on more spam lists, because scammers will know it’s a live email address and that you tend to open emails.
• Dark Web: Authors of spam emails can purchase email addresses on the dark web for low prices.
• Brute force: Spammers can leverage brute force attacks like dictionary attacks to generate different combinations of email addresses.
• Malware: Some viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware can steal email addresses. Ultimately, some of these email addresses end up on spam lists.
• Data breach: A data breach at a website you’ve signed up with can expose your email address to bad actors.

[Mamyrie09]

Many thanks Distinguished Sage and everyone that has contributed - very insightful and helpful comments.

Kind regards

Monica