Suddenly I started receiving a bunch of scam mails (phishing). I suspect some bot or bot-net is involved, because I’ve received maybe a couple hundred e-mails at the time of writing, all from different (likely auto-generated) senders. With anything from 2-10 emails per day.
The scam is essentially just some phishing, all related to the same topic. I’ve mostly been able to mitigate it by filtering out mails containing certain keywords or phrases that show up in the scam mails. However, the mails change relatively often (about once a day) so every now and then something gets through, and I’ll update my filter.
My question is really if there’s any way I can figure out
- Where this is coming from,
- How they got hold of my email
So that I can try to go after the root cause / prevent other scammers from getting hold of it.
Spam email has always been a problem, and there is really no way to find out how they got your email address and no way to prevent it either. Email lists are bought, sold and traded all the time.
What I do is keep the email client Thunderbird running on my desktop. It has a really good smart spam filter that learns from the email you receive and what you mark as spam/not spam. With IMAP, even your mobile devices benefit from the filtering.
Every few days I’ll check the junk folder and mark “not spam” anything that it incorrectly flagged as spam and go through my inbox and mark spam on anything it missed. I think it miss-flags maybe 3 or 4 emails per week right now. Doesn’t happen often.