All of a sudden large amounts of SPAM

Hi all,

I have a very newish @sky.com email address which I like to think is unmolested as only a few close friends have the email address. Since having the email address (only a few months old) I've not recieved one single spam message however I've logged into my Sky email account now and there is over 240 spam items. If I go to the oldest item it shows the 28th of April. I've logged into my email account and downloaded email since the 28th and no Spam showed up.

If my email address had been picked up by the Spammers I would expect to see the spam slowly coming in, not 200 items all of a sudden out of nowhere.

One of the problems about having an @ISP.com address is that spammers will put all sorts of random stuff in front of the @, because they know that they will get a good proportion of random hits from it. This problem isn't limited to Sky. It affects all ISPs that issue email addresses in the format [email protected]

I agree about them guessing before the @ISP.com however I had a @zen.co.uk email address for 5 years and no word of a lie I received about 20 spam emails in all that time.

I've just double checked all the spam now and the "to" address is not me so clearly there is a problem.

Edited by Markie_SA (Fri 08-May-09 13:14:39)

In reply to a post by Markie_SA:

I agree about them guessing before the @ISP.com however I had a @zen.co.uk email address for 5 years and no word of a lie I received about 20 spam emails in all that time.

I've just double checked all the spam now and the "to" address is not me so clearly there is a problem.

Spammers try to send out 100 000+ at a time if Zen was considered to small or had good anti spam programme they would be left alone much of the time. Your address is in the third line of the e-mail addresses ; first line is To: then second Cc then Bcc which is a hidden line normally.

It helps to put at least one non-letter in your address;
[email protected] gets lots of spam as the bots try ALL combinations and will find it
[email protected] , or [email protected] , or [email protected] ,or [email protected] - get very little as the bots cannot cope with non-letters

Also if you or one of your contacts has a virus, that will sometimes give away your e-mail address.
I have read that you can buy an e-mail address list for spamming purposes on the internet, all from people who have replied to fake e-mails, or sometimes stolen e-mail address (hack a company just to steal addresses).
Just try to be careful.

.