I’m Hit! Spam E-Mail Bomb Explodes.
This morning I fell victim to what has become a very common spam technique. I open my Mail this morning and have 248 message coming my way with subjects like “mail delivery failed” or “return mail: see transcript” or “undelivered: free porn”.
Yes, somehow, somewhere, someone used my email address …
my first name @ my last name dot com … as a “sender” address. Unfortunately there’s no way around this. I could send out emails as “george.bush@thewhitehouse.gov” if I wanted … although I might earn a visit from the Feds.
So, what did I do? I tried to let Mail filter most into my Spam Folder … which is did with about a 70% success rate. The remaining was destined to my In Box. But, something was going wrong. Mail was hanging on some message and not retrieving the remaining 144 message from the server. Uh, oh!
I had to log into my Webmail account. There I checked each message with the noticeably spam-esque subject line and deleted them in mass. Any message that is bold in Webmail means that my Mail application has yet to download them. That helped in identifying the culprit(s).
Oh, I forget to mention that Mail also had to be Force Quit (three times) because of the malicious message(s) that was making my “Get Mail” process hang indefinitely. So, I restart Mail in hopes that the remaining message come in. No luck. Hung again. I ended up going into Webmail and creating a folder called “keep” and moved all my good email yet to be seen in to that folder. I then “toggle all” and which selected the remaining email and I deleted. Then I went to Mail and checked mail. No new mail. Perfect. So I then went to Webmail, moved my good mail from “keep” to “inbox”. Went back to Mail and got all my unread good mail. Ah, I’m back in business. From there I sorted by Subject to help me make small work of deleting the 100+ remaining messages. This all took about 10 minutes.
So, how did I become a target? Part of my vulnerability is that I’ve had my email address since early 1996. So, my email is out there in one way or another. But, it could be worse. I take many steps to avoid being a target.
1. I don’t reply to spam
2. I don’t click on anything in a spam message.
3. I don’t try to unsubscibe to spam messages.
4. I don’t put my email address on anything in the public eye … not even my website.
5. I don’t use my email address as the “deliver to” for email forms. I use an address that I can change as needed like “formaddress01@dreier.com”
So there you have it. My experience with spam this morning. I hope your morning is going better than mine so far.
- Kyle Dreier