Increase in spam?
 

I use MS outlook to get my mail in to my desktop from Btinternet.

Up until a couple of days ago, BT internet was brilliant at diverting spam to its own spam file before it got to MS outlook.
However, over the last couple of days the MS Outlook "junk" container has been getting lots more in it.

My main inbox is thus currently protected, mainly.

Is there a recent hike in spam mail generally? Anyone else have problems with the BTinternet filter?

I had a look at the BT community website, and whilst complaints are up, the complaints are from relatively few users. Maybe I'm just unlucky.

thanks

AO

I've had many more spams in the past two or three days than normal. The filters are catching most of them, but they're still a pesky nuisance.

Probably the botnet scammers trying to rebuild after the authorities demolished one.

Less Spam
 

I use Thunderbird to read my mail which comes via BT. Interestingly I have had less 'Spam/Phishing' than normal during the past week or so.

AO - I had the same problem about a month, 6 weeks ago. I was getting 20/30 a day.

I have never had spam problems before, perhaps one or two emails a week, if that, despite my email address being all over the internet due to me running a website.

Anyway, after a month or so, it all stopped. Just like that, as TC used to say. No idea why it started or indeed stopped as it did.

I've had a significant increase in spam over the past couple of weeks. All of it was trapped by the filter at my Australian IPS, bar one.

The common factor would seem to be the email address I use for eBay transactions. Perhaps someone's data base was either hacked or sold....?

FOR

Same story here (Australia), but for approx an 8-week period that ended probably around end January. Very few now.

Yep, same here. Yahoo normally very good at filtering them but some rather obvious ones are slipping through.

How much of the filtering is done by humans?

Zero directly, after all would you really want your mail provider reading your mail? Besides, they have better things to spend their time on. Indirectly, humans train the filters by flagging mistakes. Occasionally the spammers manage to work out something that fools the filters for a little while, but the filtering catches up soon enough.

Yeh, but it seems to me they have to know the enemy to make the filters hit the target.

That's why ISPs rely on their customers marking emails as spam.
By doing so you are helping to "educate" your ISP's spam filters. In the main, spam filters work by recognising the IP address or email address of the sender - not the title of the email. Eventually the filters should catch up and recognise spam as such.

My contacts at BT say that they have noticed a large increase in spam being generated recently.
Are PCs still using Windows XP coming back to bite us?????

The ISPs subscribe to assorted lists that collect spam from many different sources - they aren't just relying on their own users. Much the same as the anti-virus companies share their finds.

What he said, and quite frankly those lists are better than unpredictable users who can have vastly differing opinions of what "spam" is.