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My IMac's email has recently been absolutely inundated with junk email. This has NEVER EVER happened before and started up last month. I am very very concerned and worried. Does anyone know what is going on? Deleting all this built up "junk" email cannot be done EXCEPT to slowly delete each email one at a time.
iMac 21.5″, OS X 10.11
I understand this can be annoying. What happens is that a spammer get your email address by various means and the result is what you see. There are normally settings in your email app where you can stop some of this. Also, your email provider usually also has such settings in their server. I would look into that. My email provider (Earthlink) also has the ability for me to designate a large number of URLs which will be rejected at the server. This is a useful tool.
I used to use a number of email addresses for business. I no longer do. One of them started to receive lots of spam. My easiest solution was to turn off that email address. Beyond doing what I've noted here, there is little else we can do. Changing our settings can be helpful, but then we should periodically check our spam folder to see if legitimate mail got caught.
It all gets down to how we I've out or use our email address. It should be used with great care. That's how spammers get it.
I understand this can be annoying. What happens is that a spammer get your email address by various means and the result is what you see. There are normally settings in your email app where you can stop some of this. Also, your email provider usually also has such settings in their server. I would look into that. My email provider (Earthlink) also has the ability for me to designate a large number of URLs which will be rejected at the server. This is a useful tool.
I used to use a number of email addresses for business. I no longer do. One of them started to receive lots of spam. My easiest solution was to turn off that email address. Beyond doing what I've noted here, there is little else we can do. Changing our settings can be helpful, but then we should periodically check our spam folder to see if legitimate mail got caught.
It all gets down to how we I've out or use our email address. It should be used with great care. That's how spammers get it.
Chances are you are receiving an email storm from only a handful of the related email servers that just change the From: addressing to give the illusion of more sources, and vex filtering. I use custom Mail rules to filter these originating servers by their Mail header return-path field, and then move these messages to the Trash in the rule.
In Mail Preferences : Rules, I start with a new rule:
In the Junk These (arbitrary name) rule, I have an entry using an added, custom mail header field known as Return-Path.
You can have multiple entries like this using the preceding If [ any ] clause to act on all of them.
This one rule may filter several apparently different SPAM emails because they all use that <bound_...> originating mail server. Apple does not by default, offer the Return-Path as a selection in a list of Mail header items, so when one clicks that Return-Path selector shown above, there is a long menu listing of header fields that are offered, and that menu ends with Edit header list… .
When one selects that menu entry, another panel appears that will allow you to add a Mail header item by clicking the + button. Here I have show the Return-Path mail header that was added to the menu.
Before you enter Mail Preferences, you select a single, SPAM email message. When you choose the Return-Path header, and contains as shown above, the actual Return-Path server string is automatically populated in the right-most field. I have the following action setup for my Junk These rule:
When I click OK, the rule is fired and asks if I want to apply it to the selected message. When I do, that message is moved to the designated junk folder with vivid yellow text. Otherwise, the active rule is applied to all inbound email that matches the Return-Path rule entry, and those junked items use the normal Apple junk mail coloration.
Eventually, Return-Path servers are changed out for different Return-Path servers, and new rules will need to be applied to catch those variations. I cut down around 30 SPAM emails a day to less than five by using this technique.
Great advice from Ronasara, just to add..
In Mail>Preferences>Viewing, uncheck load Remote content, it's one method that spammers use to se if they have a good email addy.
Another trick is to use a dead end addy like from... https://getnada.com
Thank you Ronasara. I forget to mention the most important thing..... Deleting the junk email is virtually impossible. Doing a "control" "A" to select everything in the junk folder does NOT work. Very scary indeed. I can only delete and trash one (1) junk mail at a time. Going through more than 1,000 junk mails to trash them will take days. If I try and select and delete four (4) of the junk mails, my IMAC, stops and says, " MAIL QUIT UNEXPECTEdLY " (with options to ignore or Report To Apple). This happens repeatedly. I'm going to try your advice and see if anything improves. Thank you.
Me too. It is an absolute nightmare. I am in the uk but weirdly, it started after I spent a winter in Florida. After the first year, there were just a few but after the second year, my god. Now I get more junk than not junk! Apple really need to invest in some decent junk mail software.
In Mail's Mailbox menu, click "Erase Junk Mail".
I am being inundated with junk mail that has never happened before
