My gmail is inundated with spam

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    My very first gmail address has been recently attacked by a tremendous amount of spam mail. I get about 200 spam mails per day, while normally I would just get less than 10.


    They are correctly flagged like spam and sent directly to the spam folder, however, it bugs me because they take up connection speed and they catch my attention in the mail software (Mail by Apple), and I am also worried of something else going on.


    I have read that it is a technique to bury genuine alerts from websites when accounts are violated.

    I have no idea how to stop this spam storm. They are all XXX-rated stuff.




    Another very rare stuff has been happening in the last months, always with that email. It seems it is being used by random people to subscribe to legit websites in the US.

    At first, I thought it was a genuine mistake.


    I received a booking.com confirmation and a flight confirmation under another name and an email address similar to mine (gmail doesn't count the dot in the address, so john.barry@gmail.com is the same as johnbarry@gmail.com). I inputted the confirmation codes directly on booking and on the airline website, plus the last name and they were legit!


    After a month, I received another welcome email from another website to somebody else (Michael, I think...). Then this happened again. I think I must have clicked on 'unsubscribe' on one of those email because I was tired to get those email directed to somebody else.


    This week I am getting email from petsmart: welcome, your account has been created, you order has been placed, your order is ready for pick up, thank you for shopping with us today etc.


    The odd thing is that those 'legit' emails are not labeled as spam and go directly into my inbox.


    What should I do?

    Awfully strange serafina, thankfully I don't receive any, since the gmail is my main work email for my photography I don't use it to register with potentially nefarious sites, I just use a spare email account to register, test it for up to a year, if it's ok, then I change it if no spam comes to my email


    Not saying it's your fault in anyway, just that we don't know what some sites do with the email information

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    Quote from richietog

    Awfully strange serafina, thankfully I don't receive any, since the gmail is my main work email for my photography I don't use it to register with potentially nefarious sites, I just use a spare email account to register, test it for up to a year, if it's ok, then I change it if no spam comes to my email


    Not saying it's your fault in anyway, just that we don't know what some sites do with the email information

    When I opened this email account, Gmail was a novelty, so I put up a very generic nickname and used it for non-important stuff, like registering on portals and newsletters.

    In a couple of years, gmail became predominant and was used to login to websites, so it actually became my main email address. At that point, I opened another gmail account with my real name.surname for serious business. That said, some of the portals where I registered in 2004 have been took over by spammers, abandoned, or sold their database to third parties. I have tried many times to get my name off from some portals, but they are abandoned. Crawlers have copied and replicated those portals, so my information are on even more websites that I don't know of. So far, nothing bad happened to me, but now that I rely on online work for my livelihood, I would be quite worried in case of identity theft or worse!


    Some of my clients are asking for secure way to exchange files, and I have been looking into it but I am not tech savvy enough to find a suitable solution.

    serafina ... I have had several gmail accounts and over time they all became useless, due to spam. The only sure way to deal with this is to save your contacts and delete the account and start

    a new gmail account. Their are options in gmail to block unwanted mail and send it directly to the spam folder, instead of your inbox, You can even set the spam folder to not be shown

    with the other folders, this does not delete the messages, but it does allow to delete all the spam, with one "delete all spam now option". You would think Google mail servers, after one

    blocks a sender, would not allow that sender to send mail to one's account, but "no" it is a money thing with Google, and they keep sending the mail to one's spam folder. That is why I have

    no Google account, and use an old Hotmail account with Outlook mail and Thunderbird as my mail client. Good luck with Gmail.

    Quote from serafina

    When I opened this email account, Gmail was a novelty, so I put up a very generic nickname and used it for non-important stuff, like registering on portals and newsletters.

    In a couple of years, gmail became predominant and was used to login to websites, so it actually became my main email address. At that point, I opened another gmail account with my real name.surname for serious business. That said, some of the portals where I registered in 2004 have been took over by spammers, abandoned, or sold their database to third parties. I have tried many times to get my name off from some portals, but they are abandoned. Crawlers have copied and replicated those portals, so my information are on even more websites that I don't know of. So far, nothing bad happened to me, but now that I rely on online work for my livelihood, I would be quite worried in case of identity theft or worse!


    Some of my clients are asking for secure way to exchange files, and I have been looking into it but I am not tech savvy enough to find a suitable solution.

    When I do get spam, some of them are spoof emails. Some generic usernames are easy to guess, so they must have had bot with that kind of generic emails in their database that they've hacked from sites that didn't have much security on the host they used