Has anyone noticed an absurd amount of SPAM on icloud emails? Apple used to have the best filters. I now get upwards of 100 emails every hour in my junk folder. I used to go months before getting even 10 junk emails. What happened to Apple's spam settings?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
If your account is pretty old your .mac and .me addresses are totally locked to your iCloud address as permanent aliases and can NEVER be removed. So you'll never be able to fix it from that standpoint. Try getting a spam filter like SpamSieve. Apple should be automatically doing something like that in my opinion. One solution, that could be very problematic, would be to get a different iCloud account. BUT, then you may lose some programs and will definitely lose Apple music or iTunes. Apple has no way you can move things to a new Apple iCould account without issues. Or do a new account but discontinue email totally on the old account and restart email with the new account. Then, you would still have access to things like iTunes but would have to sign in to your old account to use it. Due to the ever changing nature of spam nothing Apple offers truly works for long. Especially with spam from lists and groups. It just keeps coming with simple changes of a letter, or number somewhere in the from or to fields. What I was told was to send all spam to abuse@apple.com. Either directly or as an attachment. This takes time but if it overloads Apple maybe they'll finally start to take it seriously. Of course they don't read any of it but perhaps an uptick in numbers will be noticed. This is shameful on Apple's part. I have had many conversations with Apple about this and they either have no idea or what they offer won't really work. There is no reason I can think of for them not to allow the deletion of mac.com and me.com or to be able to switch to a different iCloud account without all the hassles and losses of programs, data, whatever. They can't even tell me what would really be affected.
I can say that the volume has not decreased, easily still getting over 600/day and increasing when in the past it was a third of that, however, they are at least being directed to junk, which had ceased altogether, prior.
Apple's silence on this and other software issues, which are a regular thing at this point, is really not ok. Are their younger engineers simply afraid of criticism or acknowledging mistakes then seeking to correct them? Apple is not the company I once loved supporting but merely the better of necessary evils in the 2023. Companies like Google don't protect you from Google itself, so they aren't really an alternative. Do better, Apple.
Mine just decreased dramatically today. But I'm not holding my breath because I've seen lulls before. I have still been forwarding my daily junk as an attachment to abuse@icloud.com and reportphishing@apple.com, despite no official response from Apple. Most days, I am forwarding hundreds, today only four! But one day is not a trend nor a fix.
About two weeks ago, I forwarded Tim Cook a day's worth of Junk mail and asked for his help. No response. Of course, I could have missed a response from him, as it would most likely have ended up in my Junk Mail Box. I'm hoping someone will take note and fix this mess once and for all.
Blade_84 wrote:
In just the last few days I've noticed that spam has started showing up in my Inbox. Prior to this, Apple had fantastic spam filters. No matter how many I received, they never showed in my Inbox. Ugh, apparently they've loosened their filters? This isn't very reassuring.
Dealing with spam is an arms race. Email providers improve their filters and for a while, you'll see less spam. Then, the senders of spam figure out a way around them. You see more spam. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Ad infinitum.
Hey all, I've just read through all 5 pages and thought I would add my voice to list of voices.
I've also been getting ridiculous amounts of spam since around December 2022. And just like you guys, I have added rules, blocks and forwarded on the Spam with no improvement or let up.
It seems to wax and wane, but it has been pretty relentless since the end of 2022.
I'm hoping that with Sonoma, a fix might be incoming... Otherwise, it might just be time to retire my iCloud email address...
Unfortunately apple went from having the best email and spam filtering to the absolute worst. I’ve been using their mail as my primary provider since the @mac.com days, and this excessive spam thing started 6-8 months ago and has gotten progressively worse. Hundreds and hundreds of new junk mail every day, and important stuff being randomly sent to junk for the first time from senders I’ve been receiving mail from for years. It got to the point where I was having two week through hundreds of messages in my junk folder to make sure nothing important went there, and then move all the spam and scams from my inbox to junk, try to block some of the senders, and set up new filtering rules. Email is not supposed to be that difficult to manage. As much as it sucks, I’m having to switch to use something else for my primary email address. It’s been a good 15 years but what a disaster this has become. If only Apple had the means to fix this, oh wait, they do. It’s honestly embarrassing for them that it’s this bad.
All of a sudden I am getting slammed also. There seems to be so many easy fixes Apple could implement. Such as ability to report an email address, permanently ban / block an email address and or domain. Lately I am getting >100 per day and many are going into my inbox.
I always read my junk folder because too often, legitimate emails go there. But this problem is making email unmanageable.
I have followed all of these tips, plus have called and talked to specialists regarding this issue. For a few months, all seemed to be going well after creating close to 100 rules on my iCloud account (which I think is ridiculous, but this was what was suggested to me by the last specialist I spoke with - in other words, Apple isn't probably going to do anything about it, so you do the work 😐).
Anywho, now in the last week, I've been getting bombarded again. I am blocking and then deleting each without opening, but also now I'm forwarding the messages to "reportfishing@apple.com" and hoping that gives some relief. Here are the types of messages I'm receiving:
I respect your comments. However, this particular situation arose almost over night. I've had an iCloud email address since the .mac days. If a few days time, it went from no spam to hundreds of spam messages a day. Many others experienced this. And the spam coming in is so obviously spam, it should have been filtered at the provider level. (Subjects with obviously spam content, no text in the message area, etc.)
That said, the spam has recently decreased significantly. I have hope...
Just because this issue isn’t happening to you specifically does not mean it’s not happening at all. This has become a huge problem in the last year or so and it’s not because those of us who are experiencing it don’t understand how e-mail works. I’ve got emails from friends and family I email often going to spam, and hundreds of spam a day have been filling up my junk mailbox as well as some trickling into my main inbox. It got to the point where I had to scroll through the hundreds of spam messages each day in junk just to make sure I wasn’t missing something important that got filtered incorrectly (happened often). I finally had to make the switch to other options for email. This is definitely not simply a “if you use an email address for a long time you’ll get more spam” situation.
I can’t pinpoint when it started, but it’s got to be around the last year or so.
I’ve used an @me.com address since its inception and apart from the occasional spam email and legit email that got accidentally sorted into the junk folder, I’ve never had an issue.
Fast forward to the last year and I’ve been getting a wild increase of junk every hour of the day. It’s all going into the junk folder thankfully, but interestingly what I’ve noticed is that it’s all being sent to my @me.com inbox but they’re addressing it to @icloud.com - which of course automatically redirects to my @me.com inbox.
I’ve never, ever used @icloud.com, so somewhere along the line either a lucky guess or leak has occurred and now I’m paying the price by having to sift through all this rubbish.
If I could turn off any instance of @icloud.com being used, it’d completely solve my problem
Bill Mullen1 wrote:
I like what earthlink is doing.
Earthlink is still in business? Wow!
I use Spark as my email application, and it has a feature where I have to approve incoming emails. It doesn't require any action on the sender's part though. I like it a lot. I think that may be a function of the paid tier.
I have had a daily excess of crap in my icloud email for several years now. I tried blocking and that helps for a few days but then others come via other companies or the same ones come back. I go to the bottom of every one and UNSUBSCRIBE, even though I never subscribed. I'm starting to wonder if icloud (Apple) is selling my email address. How would a person know.??
I’m having the same problem. Was getting worse over the last year and in the last month, the problem has tripled. I need to scan through junk email box to make sure no legitimate emails accidentally been put in there, which does happen, so I can’t just ignore my junk email folder. With the amount of junk mail each day, it is becoming very time consuming.
Add to that, the junk email is now showing up in my inbox as well and that is new. While the amount of junk emails showing up in the junk folder has been increasing over the last year and surged in the last few months; having some appear in my inbox has only started in the last two weeks.
Something has changed. This is crazy. I have done all recommended steps. I have the mail protection on, I block, I never open the email, I forward to abuse@icloud.com, spam@icloud.com, report phishing to the recommended emails, I have rules set. Nothing helps.
This past week there seems to be a surge. I am getting 100 SPAM emails about every 20 mins.
I have the same issue, and it happened very suddenly. I am getting a TON of spam in my iCloud account, and no amount of messing with the junk filter seems to help. I will wake up to 180 messages in my inbox that I marked as junk the day prior. What the heck happened? The filter was working great before.
Spam overload on iCloud Email Address
