Is it me or is Spam a major issue with Orange?

Finally lost it with Orange & have requested MAC to migrate. No problems at all with internet but over past few months my spam mail receipts have gone crazy......50 a day-ish.

None of these are addressed to "valid" mail addresses eg [email protected]

but to...... eg

[email protected]
[email protected] etc etc

My assumption is that Orange's email address structure is the main culprit & that by migrating to , say, virgin..... my spam will at least be reduced eg [email protected]

1. Does anybody else have this problem?
2. Is there a solution?
3. Is my assumption about a different email structure correct?

Cheers in advance

Had this problem for ages, my inbox is always full of [censored] and i cannot add all the addresses to the block list because its full.

It annoys me, but not really sure what I can do about it.

Ive just filtered out certain words in each email. Currently only have 51 on my blocked list (40 addresses & 11 blocked words) and it filters out around 98% of [censored] each day, the rest of the [censored] gets filtered via Mozilla ;o)

One thing ive found is not to blame Orange for this email problem, they just inherited it from Wanadoo, another thing i have noticed is my PROPER Orange email address (Orange.net accounts) doesnt get any spam @ all!

Edited by KAT1969 (Wed 03-Jan-07 20:40:13)

Whilst there are many other good reasons to migrate, you don't have to do that just for th eemail problem.

Just sign up with another email provider (such as yahoo.co.uk) and simply stop using the freeserve one.

I used Orange webmail and found that Orange had become pretty good at filtering spam into the junk email folder, and now only the odd one gets through into the inbox. I don't use the block list because the addresses that the spam come from are never the same. I had to use the allow list quite a bit though because valid emails were getting marked as spam, especially after Orange seemed to tighten up a few months ago. It's settled down now to the point that I very rarely get valid email marked as spam and just a couple of spam emails a week being missed.

It's not specifically an Orange problem.

Are these spam emails real spam, or delivery reports from other addresses for spam addressed to them? What's happened to me, and what may have happened to you, is that spammers have got hold of your domain address from somewhere and are sending out spam using your domain address, with random sets of characters before the @. When these emails get bounced for various reasons, the bounce messages come to you.

It is due to the fact that with Orange you can have an infinite number of email addresses by varying what goes in front of the @. If you went to somewhere else without that flexibility you would avoid it, but you would lose that flexibility.

One solution would be that if you know you only use certain things before the @ (john, mary, crowajnr), you could filter out and ignore emails for anything else.

Unfortunately, once the spammers have your address, there's nothing you can do to stop them using it. With me it's worse because I do have my own domain (e.g. smithfamily.org.uk), so even switching ISPs won't help, only ditching the domain altogether, which I don't want to do.

Thanks for reply, roughly 80% is undeliverable error return messages, 10% random [email protected] & 10% real spam.

Do you know how I configure to filter out mails from these random characters??

OR could you recommend a provider who has more limitations - I only need 4 addresses.

Cheers!

In reply to:

---

Do you know how I configure to filter out mails from these random characters??

---

If you ask Orange tech support they will tell you that you can set up mail routing filter rules to divert any emails not conforming with your wanted prefixes to the deleted items folder. Sounds great, doesn't it? Unfortunately the Orange webmail interface filter rules only work on emails that are not tagged as ***SPAM*** by the spam filter. Any emails that are so tagged are simply ignored by the routing filters......

Edited by bobbear (Thu 04-Jan-07 14:44:52)

In reply to:

---

Could you recommend a provider who has more limitations - I only need 4 addresses.

---

You could register 4 email addresses with [email protected]

Here's the link to register

http://webmailregistration.orange.co.uk/registration/add_details.jsp

90days log in time (not 30 like others) 5MB space, but can increase to 250MB when nearly full.

And if your careful who you give your address to you won't have any spam, only one of my fsmail.net addresses, gets loads of spam and i've got about 4, but that address has been everywhere.

Hope this helps