Spam inundation

[Dave2002]

I have an old email account, which I still use, and it's administered by TalkTalk. Recently it has become almost totally useless due to vast quantities of unwanted emails - presumably a significant proportion of which contain malware.

Is there anything I can sensibly do (e.g with TalkTalk) to remedy the situation, or should I just completely cancel that email account?

[David-G]

I have three email accounts - with PlusNet (my ISP), Yahoo, and Gmail. All of them have virtually no spam. I am afraid that I can't answer your question. But I am curious why your account should have so much spam, while I have hardly any.

[Duchess]

I have three email accounts - with PlusNet (my ISP), Yahoo, and Gmail. All of them have virtually no spam. I am afraid that I can't answer your question. But I am curious why your account should have so much spam, while I have hardly any.

I am in the middle of losing my v.gg account - with over 200 folders! My breakdown is booked for 1st Feb, when it will finally close. So, I'm trying fastmail.com and await a reply as to whether I can transfer all the folders. I doubt it somehow. 15 years of work and general stuff in the bin. Nightmare. Do think carefully before you dump your account, though. There must be a spam filter somewhere?

What about looking at the cookie controls in your browser and delete as many as you can and set it to only set them for the sites you need (like this one!) Does this help?

PS - I have noticed that btinternet is prone to being used by unauthorised people; had one from a "friend" yesterday, in fact.

[french frank]

I have a number of accounts. Perhaps not surprisingly the two which simply exchange emails between my own computers never have spam. Otherwise I only get spam from friends whose accounts have been hacked - perhaps one every two or three months. It could be that I have an overzealous spam filter (I always forget to look to see what it has refused to download).

All accounts are either btinternet or our own for3.org . So no help here, then …

[David-G]

I am in the middle of losing my v.gg account - with over 200 folders!

Sorry - what is v.gg?

[Duchess]

Sorry - what is v.gg?

Ah - it's based in Idaho (obviously) and for many years has been a stalwart of my email stable. It is hosted by Everyone.net and they seem to fallen out, so Everyone is sacking them on 8th Feb unless they (V) do something; I know not what. Tough luck on us punters! here is the url, if you're interested: www.v.gg where you will see their "apology".

[ahinton]

I have an old email account, which I still use, and it's administered by TalkTalk. Recently it has become almost totally useless due to vast quantities of unwanted emails - presumably a significant proportion of which contain malware.

Is there anything I can sensibly do (e.g with TalkTalk) to remedy the situation, or should I just completely cancel that email account?

I have precisely the same problem with TalkTalk and they're continuing to investigate. I am not one of their paying cutomers with a TalkTalk landline number; my relationship with them is due solely to the fact of my having a couple of orphaned email addresses that were once owned by Tiscali, although even these were ont originally under Tiscali's ownership as they are @lineone.net addresses. For quite some time TalkTalk refused to TalkTalk to me for that very reason but I wrote to its CEO and am now in discussions with the company. They proposed to ontroduce some new email filtration facilities this month but they were deemd unfit for purpose and they now claim that they'll be doing this from 8 February so, whilst your decision is of course yours alone to make, I'm going to wait and see how and if this works. The odd thing is that this spam affects only one of my two @lineone.net addresses.

[ahinton]

Ah - it's based in Idaho (obviously) and for many years has been a stalwart of my email stable. It is hosted by Everyone.net and they seem to fallen out, so Everyone is sacking them on 8th Feb unless they (V) do something; I know not what. Tough luck on us punters! here is the url, if you're interested: www.v.gg where you will see their "apology".

...or not; I cannot access that server.

[french frank]

...or not; I cannot access that server.

The registrants appear to be Chinese and the IP address Utah rather than Idaho …

[Quarky]

I have an old email account, which I still use, and it's administered by TalkTalk. Recently it has become almost totally useless due to vast quantities of unwanted emails - presumably a significant proportion of which contain malware.

Is there anything I can sensibly do (e.g with TalkTalk) to remedy the situation, or should I just completely cancel that email account?

my inbox (Claranet) is set up just to receive mail from trusted sources - the rest goes into junk mail. However I have to be careful to check the junk mail folder everyday, I have had an extremely important email lying in my junk mail folder for a week before I noticed it.

the amount of junk mail and malware is increasing steadily, including false emails from myself and associates. Sometimes I think one's email address may be distributed to junk-mailers by outfits you may have had some innocent association with.

[Dave2002]

I have precisely the same problem with TalkTalk and they're continuing to investigate. I am not one of their paying cutomers with a TalkTalk landline number; my relationship with them is due solely to the fact of my having a couple of orphaned email addresses that were once owned by Tiscali, although even these were ont originally under Tiscali's ownership as they are @lineone.net addresses. For quite some time TalkTalk refused to TalkTalk to me for that very reason but I wrote to its CEO and am now in discussions with the company. They proposed to ontroduce some new email filtration facilities this month but they were deemd unfit for purpose and they now claim that they'll be doing this from 8 February so, whilst your decision is of course yours alone to make, I'm going to wait and see how and if this works. The odd thing is that this spam affects only one of my two @lineone.net addresses.

Thanks for the info. I'm not the only one with ex Tinyworld or Tiscali accounts who is being/has been affected. Reportedly things got worse with email problems after the TalkTalk hack incident a few months ago, but maybe I was "lucky" - the tsunami only started to come in a week or two back. I used to have paid for services, and for a while we even had a direct TalkTalk connection which we paid for, but gave it up as they turned out to be hopeless at dealing with problems.

The company, and/or its subsidiaries seem to be hopeless at security issues. Sometimes I get warnings about insecure connections, security certificates etc., and TalkTalk sites and email do appear to be poor for security.

I shall follow your suggestion and wait until February - but it's a total pain. In the meantime, can I hide the account from my Apple Mac OS X mail so that I won't see all the junk till I try to sort things out in February. Curently I have three email accounts showing up in my mail, and if I could suspend the viewing ot the most affected account that'd be helpful. i could delete it from the mail client, then reinstate later, but surely there must be a way of shutting it off for a while. Maybe not!

[Frances_iom]

thunderbird can usually import various format mailboxes - runs on Linux and in past (maybe still does) on Mac + Windoze - I pay for mail redirection with included spamfilter tho Thunderbird is generally fairly good at learning to distinguish spam from other mail