Question Ridiculous amount of OBVIOUS spam not being caught by Yahoo

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J-Po

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Feb 16, 2021
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Hi,

I'm sure there's nothing I can do about this, but I've had my email address for a million years - it's an sbcglobal.net address, and I access it via Currently from AT&T / Yahoo Mail.

Anyway, I went for literally DECADES getting ZERO spam, then all of a sudden a couple of years ago I started getting CRAZY amounts of spam every day. I noticed that the "To:" on many of the emails didn't actually list my email address (not sure how I was still getting them?), so I made a filter that blocked emails where the "To" field does not contain my email address, and that worked like a charm! For several months, I was back to getting NO spam at all.

Then a few days ago the spam started again. Now, not only will I get up to 6 duplicate emails all sent within minutes of each other, so they are OBVIOUSLY spam and Yahoo should be blocking them and doesn't, but the To: field just has a string of random numbers and letters (although when I hover over it, my email appears[?]) so my
awesome filter doesn't seem to work on them. Additionally, the From: field lists a name, but no email address and when I hover over the name, no email address appears, so I can't make a filter to block it.

Because many of the emails say that they're from McAfee or Norton, I tried making a filter to delete emails where the From: field says McAfee or Norton, but it's not working because I guess my filter is only looking at the actual email address (that I can't see) and not the From name?

I'm at my wit's end. Anyone have any advice?

Thanks so much,
Jenny

https://imgur.com/a/YQfbBrH
 
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Create a new Gmail account or one you already have and setup the sbcglobal.net address to forward to a Gmail account. Gmail does a much better job of filtering out obvious spam and it is much easier to setup filters on.
 
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Another option to consider is to "whitelist" your address book and only allow emails from those listed in the address book to go to the Inbox.

All other emails then being routed to a folder of your choice.

One disadvantage being that some emails (from a doctor, business, or other source not in your address book could end up in that folder.

So you will still need to peruse the folder before doing a mass delete of all those unopened/unread emails.

But you can make the deletion process easier by sorting the folder and scanning for any emails that need to be retrieved.

FYI:

https://www.whitelist.guide/gmail/

https://clean.email/blog/email-security/how-to-whitelist-an-email
 
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after fighting with spam and such for a while, i gave up and just bought my own domain and use it for my email address.

i don't get spam anymore since there is only 3 addresses from my domain and not worth it for the spambots to attack. best $20 a year i spend
 
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Math Geek said:
after fighting with spam and such for a while, i gave up and just bought my own domain and use it for my email address.

i don't get spam anymore since there is only 3 addresses from my domain and not worth it for the spambots to attack. best $20 a year i spend
Click to expand...

Interesting! I'm not a super tech person, although I'm fairly savvy. If it's not too much trouble, can you explain what you mean when you say "there are only 3 addresses from my domain"? And how does one go about buying their own domain? $20 seems like a deal, since Yahoo wants $5 a month to upgrade in order to get a forwarding option...
 
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i use namecheap.com to buy the domain. usually only a couple bucks a year to register it.

then i use their email hosting service. they run sales all the time and mine expire around black friday when they run great sales. so the ~$30 per year 3 account service i got for less than $20 for the year on black friday sales.

Namecheap

www.namecheap.com www.namecheap.com

in the account management section of the account i tell it what email addresses i want and it hosts them. you can pay per address or get one of the bigger packages if you need more which comes with so many to start with. so you buy myname.com and then you can create me@myname.com, her@myname.com, him@myname.com and so on and so on. no more lisabear_12345 or other odd name when you are the only one with the domain :)

you own the domain name so no one else can have a site or email or anything related to it. so rather than using yahoo.com or gmail.com or whatever, you have a unique name that you control so you get to pick what addresses exist and don't. they even allow free aliases that all forward to your main address. so you can have a personal and business name that all comes to the same inbox.

you could create your own email server but that was more than i anted to deal with. so i just pay them for the email hosting. it is a web based email app which easily works with pop3 or imap clients.
 
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Ralston18 said:
Another option to consider is to "whitelist" your address book and only allow emails from those listed in the address book to go to the Inbox.

All other emails then being routed to a folder of your choice.

One disadvantage being that some emails (from a doctor, business, or other source not in your address book could end up in that folder.

So you will still need to peruse the folder before doing a mass delete of all those unopened/unread emails.

But you can make the deletion process easier by sorting the folder and scanning for any emails that need to be retrieved.

FYI:

https://www.whitelist.guide/gmail/

https://clean.email/blog/email-security/how-to-whitelist-an-email
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't see any option to whitelist my address book and only allow emails from those in my contacts...and when I tried to Google instructions on how to do that, the only results I got were for whitelisting individual contacts. Do you have any further advice on how to do this?
 
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Use only a subset of the Subject and make absolutely sure that that text matches EXACTLY. Use copy/paste to ensure an exact match. Spammers will change the subject line with each batch to get around rules, that's the reason for not using the entire subject line so be ready for this.
 
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ex_bubblehead said:
Use only a subset of the Subject and make absolutely sure that that text matches EXACTLY. Use copy/paste to ensure an exact match. Spammers will change the subject line with each batch to get around rules, that's the reason for not using the entire subject line so be ready for this.
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Thanks for the response. I also have a filter that only uses a subset of the subject and that's not working either. And I know from experience that spammers will slightly change the subject line, but in this particular instance, for whatever reason, these spammers happen to be using the exact same subject line for every single email. That's why I created an additional filter using the exact subject line (as you can see from the image I posted). None of my filters are working, no matter how I set them up 🙁
 
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Not sure about Yahoo email per se so will need to defer to a Yahoo email users who may know how to "whitelist" all of your address book/contacts.

FYI:

https://clean.email/blog/email-security/how-to-whitelist-an-email

https://ireadlabelsforyou.com/wp-co...-to-whitelist-an-email-in-popular-domains.pdf

If Yahoo does not allow or otherwise permit some blanket filter using your contacts/email address book then you may need to use domain names or individually allow selected senders into the " Inbox".

Or simply take the time to individually whitelist acceptable senders.

Over time, the safe senders will all be white listed and the the other emails going to "Trash".
 
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Ralston18 said:
Not sure about Yahoo email per se so will need to defer to a Yahoo email users who may know how to "whitelist" all of your address book/contacts.

FYI:

https://clean.email/blog/email-security/how-to-whitelist-an-email

https://ireadlabelsforyou.com/wp-co...-to-whitelist-an-email-in-popular-domains.pdf

If Yahoo does not allow or otherwise permit some blanket filter using your contacts/email address book then you may need to use domain names or individually allow selected senders into the " Inbox".

Or simply take the time to individually whitelist acceptable senders.

Over time, the safe senders will all be white listed and the the other emails going to "Trash".
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I appreciate the help, but I don't understand these suggestions - how will whitelisting individual emails help send spam to the trash? The emails I want to receive are already coming through, so there's no need to whitelist them and unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't see how the act of whitelisting individual "non spam" emails is going to send spam emails to the trash...?

"Individually allowing selected senders into the inbox" sounds like the same thing as whitelisting my address book, which Yahoo doesn't allow me to do.

And I can't block domains because the sender's email address is hidden from me as I mentioned in the first post. All I see is a name with no email address, even when I hover over it. Additionally, when I open one of these spam emails, I do not get the menu options "block sender" or "filter messages like this" like I do with every other email. 🙁
 
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ex_bubblehead said:
Yahoo allows one to manually mark messages as SPAM and learns from that.
Click to expand...

This is how it's supposed to work, but it most definitely is NOT working in my case because as I mentioned in my first post, I'm getting 20+ emails a day, almost all of them supposedly coming from an anti virus company, a great many of them have the exact same subject line, almost all of them come within minutes of each other, so they are quite obviously spam and I HAVE been marking every single one of them as Spam and yet Yahoo isn't learning OR catching a single one of them.

And none of my filters are working either.
 
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You can either contact their support or start up a new Google email and don’t use it on websites for anything don’t register anywhere with it unless you wanted to get passed around so they can start sending you spam. Also their spam filter is very good as mentioned before
 
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The way my "white listing" works is that emails from anyone in my address book are allowed to go to my Inbox.

All other emails are simply routed to "Trash".

Which I screen and then mass delete as warranted. If there is something that I need to save it is usually correspondence with some company or service.

I have folders for those emails and may or may not set up a rule to route them accordingly.
 
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