Suddenly receiving lots of strange SPAM

Hi guys,


I'm hoping someone could help me as I'm tearing my hair out.


Basically over the last few weeks I've started receiving spam email in my outlook/hotmail email. I access outlook via google chrome browser. I've hardly ever got spam and any that I did, I'd set a rule for outlook to put it into junk folder, which worked great.


But over the last few weeks even after putting rules and sending it to junk folder, it just keeps getting worse. Now I'm getting around 15-20 spam emails per day.


But my concern is that many of the emails coming through are under titles of things that I may have searched for in the past. Most seriously are already marked as FLAGGED as though I've manually selected and flagged them as an important email.

How can this be possible?


I am running windows 10. I've already done a virus/malware check, but can't find anything and have cleared the cookies.


What can I do to combat this?


Thank you.

Go to your ISP and ask them to temporarily suspend your email service for 5 days.This will have the effect of telling spam senders your address is no longer active and in most cases the spammers will remove your address.You might need to let family and friends know beforehand.

I'm sorry, but my email service is with a standard microsoft outlook/hotmail account. I've had the same email for almost 2 decades.

I have noticed more spam emails to my Outlook account recently as well. I have started to use my Google email more and more as it the one account that works the best so far.

joeandmarg0 said:

Go to your ISP and ask them to temporarily suspend your email service for 5 days.This will have the effect of telling spam senders your address is no longer active and in most cases the spammers will remove your address.You might need to let family and friends know beforehand.

In my experience, spammers don't care. They don't even bother to eliminate duplicates from their lists. It costs them nothing, so they aren't going to spend any effort pruning their list.

To Mystere.
When your account is stopped, the emails are returned to sender,regardless who provides the service.The spammers do not want their in box filled with junk either.
My method works because I've done it,which is why I offered it.
All providers can do this if they think your webmail is being misused,especially by a particular organisation.
Persistence and patience are a must.

joeandmarg0 said:

To Mystere.
When your account is stopped, the emails are returned to sender,regardless who provides the service.The spammers do not want their in box filled with junk either.
My method works because I've done it,which is why I offered it.
All providers can do this if they think your webmail is being misused,especially by a particular organisation.
Persistence and patience are a must.

Do you understand how spammers work? Do you really think they use their own return addresses? They don't. They take over other peoples email accounts and spam from them. They take over servers and setup their own email servers. They do all kinds of things, but the one thing they never ever ever do, is use their own return addresses.... lol.

I get a ton of "return address" spam, which is where a spammer has used my email address in their return address, so when stuff bounces, it bounces back to the hapless victim they used as their patsy.

Thank you Mystere.I do not get spam,you still do.That makes your system better.

I hope my thread isn't causing any dispute here....pls don't argue guys. I'm sure each one is right in their own way.

The fact is that I want to move to gmail, but I've had this email for almost 2 decades, so I would need to somehow migrate across to gmail as easily and smoothly as possible. Any suggestions how I can do this?