Spam for the holiday

[billbenson]

I get some spam. Most of it ends in my spam folder. I use Thunderbird. I get 30 or 40 spam messages a day across several email addresses I have.

I'm pretty good at detecting spam. I've been working online for years.

Over the holiday weekend I received 440 spam emails. That has to be triple what I normally see. They were mostly designed to look like other Xmas offers so they were pretty transparent.

Just a reminder to be careful what you click on.

[cbscreative]

Oh so true!! I think this is the heaviest spam levels of the year.

Maybe I'm more in tune because I use a very proactive strategy to limit the spam my clients get on their site/blog forms and this time of year is really something. Well, that and my own email spam spikes like crazy, even though like you a lot of it it goes to a spam box.

[billbenson]

Ya, it's the sort of stuff that makes me worry about my mother clicking on something.

[KristineS]

I'd have to guess that the week of Thanksgiving is probably one of the heaviest e-mail weeks of the year. Everyone is sending out their holiday special e-mails, and that includes the spammers and the scammers (who are often the same person). People tend to be a little more likely to click on something this time of year, since almost everyone is on the alert for the great Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal.

[LeadMaster]

Wow, 440 emails just over the weekend, that is annoying ! Good thing emails can be quickly deleted in Thunderbird. This is also a situation companies should take into consideration to make sure their emails are labeled correctly so consumers identify the emails and are not put off by questioning if the email should be trusted or not.

[billbenson]

I had another 496 from Monday morning through Wednesday... Thunderbird is pretty good. It cost most of them.

Almost a bigger problem is over aggressive IT people. Most of my customers have access to emails listed as spam. Some are blocked at a server level. My customer needs to go to the IT people so they can receive emails from me. I've had to send quotes by FAX because it was easier to get it to the customer.

[sharky]

I use gmail and have almost no spam. It works perfectly!

[billbenson]

The major free emails are quite good at getting rid of spam. However, there are reasons you may not want to use them as well, depending on your business.

[Brian Altenhofel]

I had another 496 from Monday morning through Wednesday... Thunderbird is pretty good. It cost most of them.

Almost a bigger problem is over aggressive IT people. Most of my customers have access to emails listed as spam. Some are blocked at a server level. My customer needs to go to the IT people so they can receive emails from me. I've had to send quotes by FAX because it was easier to get it to the customer.

Most IT folks use third party services to manage blacklists.

[vangogh]

I haven't had that many spam emails, though I do seem to be getting a little more than usual. Comment spam on my blog is up. Akismet catches all of it, but I've noticed I've been getting 5k-6k spam comments a day recently.

[KristineS]

Comment spam has been up on the EnMart blogs too by a lot. Most of it is getting caught before I ever have to deal with it, but I'm surprised at how much is coming in. Guess the spammers are working overtime.

[vangogh]

Yeah, none of the comment spam is getting through on my site either, but it's crazy how much of it is coming. If the forum gets slow at any point in the near future, it's probably because my blog is getting overwhelmed with spam. Early today I cleared out the spam and before the page could reload a few dozen more spam comments had arrived.

[cbscreative]

That's a whopping amount of comment spam for sure, vangogh. It's good your Askimet is preventing it from appearing on your sites, but I'm curious if you've implemented blocking their access to your site instead of just the spam. It seems this past year has gone from lots of spam to hyperdrive spam as if some new incentives have been offered. I've also noticed the spammers aren't content to just drop a pickup load any more, they show up with freight trains instead. I've done well with identifying the repeat offenders and blocking their access so they have no ability to submit anything. For WP sites the WP Better Security plugin has a great Ban Users feature.