For years, I never really got spam emails (not counting the usual subscription spam). But suddenly, I’ve started receiving emails like this from the following address: payperceva1982@op.pl
Good morning. I represent Kilian Paris, a brand synonymous with luxury and timeless elegance. We’re exploring collaborations with select creators and would love to discuss an opportunity with you. Let me know if you’d like to receive more details!
I use mailbox.org, so I checked my blacklist and found another sender: linkreadistti1973@op.pl
Seems like a Polish spammer/bot/whatever has somehow gotten hold of one of my alternative email aliases (thankfully not my personal email, but still annoying).
Has anyone else received emails like this from Polish domains? If I blacklist this sender, I’m 99% sure I’ll just get another one in a week or two.
What should I do? Keep blacklisting? Contact mailbox.org?
Another solution (I suppose) would be to check all the websites where I’ve used this email alias to sign up, change to a new alias, and then terminate the alias that keeps receiving spam. This sounds like a bit of a pain in the ass.
Sounds like your email address was in a data leak or something. Or maybe they just brute forced it and found a valid one. You can check https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and see if it shows up in any known data leaks.
I know I’m a lazy fart, but is there a good guide on common settings and best practices for email providers/services/settings/strategies? I’m a total noob when it comes to this.
All I really know is that Gmail is bad, and in my case, Mailbox seems good—but I haven’t enabled or used any of the privacy-related settings. I also don’t have a solid strategy for managing my email. What I’m most curious about is what email to use when signing up for things—should I continue with my strategy (personal for goverment, aliases for everything else?).
Right now, my workflow looks like this:
Government services: I use my main/personal email alias.
All other services: I use a disposable email alias that forwards to my main inbox.
Any tips or good resources would be much appreciated!"
The good thing is that it’s sent to my email alias (a random name not linked to me), but it gets forwarded to my main inbox, so it ends up directly in there.
I’ve reached out to the support team.
For now, I’m just blocking and deleting the emails. If it keeps up and I get more and more of them, I guess I’ll have to change my email address for all the sites/services where I’ve used this one.
That may be a better option to do. Unless support come back with something else.
At least you are using an alias, so you can just recreate a new one. But it may be worth seeing if any alias you used for signing have sold your info or such.
Make sure you don’t end up in a cat and mouse game. That is, you change to a new alias only for them to find it again and spam you. I suggest you try minimizing your digital footprint. Do a scan to find out who has your PII then remove yourself or have a data removal service do it for you.
A single data point, but I think email spam is up. I base this on a couple of things.
First, for the longest time my email server has rejected typically between 20% and 30% of the mail sent to it. Those rejections are based on SPF, DKIM, DMAC, grey listing, as well as just plain SMTP protocol issues. Recently that rejection rate has climbed to numbers I’d never seen before like 50% to 80%.
Second, more spam has gotten through those blocks. From typically zero per day to now 1 to 3 per day. Fortunately, most of the ones that get through are for an old email address I do not send on nowadays and I will probably just delete the alias on it. And also most of the email is coming from servers and accounts in countries that I never expect to receive valid email from so I can just set a country wide block on my server.
Since you are using an email provider and that provider probably doesn’t like spam getting through either, I’d suggest that you contact their support and let them know what you are seeing. They might be able to find some improvements that can be made on their anti-spam setup on their servers.