Spam mail send to my @me.com address, never happened before

The same happened to both myself and my parents today. I hadn't had any spam at all in my Dot Mac/MobileMe/iCloud address since getting it in 2003.

I see it's happened to others today, too:

http://www.ifans.com/forums/threads/who-gotten-a-spam-email-in-your-icloud-email .387942/

I wouldn't worry about the email having loaded in your Mail app. What I want to know is:

• How has someone managed to get hold of 'private' me.com addresses?
• How extensively has it been done?
• Will they now be selling the addresses to other spammers, too?

It'll be horrible if my me.com address is bombarded with spam from now onwards.

Also on a Danish Mac forum:

http://www.macnyt.dk/forum/?page=thread&topic=135316873563457330

(In Danish.)

I'm waiting for the big American Apple sites to pick up on it, and then we can find out what it's about. Hopefully Apple itself might say something, too.

Several people have reported this - I've had what looks like a version of it myself. I'm afraid spam is a fact of life; email addresses get out, or often get guessed as spammers send out thousands of messages to possible addresses in the hope that some of them will get through. Delete and forget, and I'm afraid you will have to get used to it. Try the Mail junk filter, or SpamSieve.

I've also been getting the Christine Meyer spams. I forward each, with full headers, to

spam@me.com and spam@uce.gov

I have a macro that brings up the full header, adds the two email addresses and forwards the email.

So if you forward these emails to Apple they are pretty good at blocking them.

OT

How has someone managed to get hold of 'private' me.com addresses?

There's no such thing as a 'private' me.com address. Even if you don't publish it anywhere doesn't mean it is private. Spammers have the means to randomly generate potentially valid usernames @me.com. If they send enough of these emails, they are guaranteed to catch quite a few legitimate email addresses.

Today I have recieved these Christine Meyer emails to two of my @me.com addresses - one email and one obscure alias which has never been used. So, either the spammers are very good at guessing, or someone has managed to get hold of an @me.com email database.

In the past it was easy to validate whether a particular @me.com username was in use - all they had to do was create a computer script that visited http://gallery.me.com/username or http://homepage.mac.com/username. If the page existed, then the username was valid. Spam ahoy!

I fully disagree with the defeatist attitude that we should get used to spam (& phishing and other email ills) and hope your spam filters direct the message to your spam folder. Any email that reaches the target, via the spam folder or not, is a win for the spammers. Apple, Google, ATT, Yahoo and every other ISP provider have been washing their hands of this issue because spam benefits them. Users need to insist that internet providers appropriately block these messages now and stop believing that spam folders is a good thing. If I know a spam message is in my spam folder, then the message got through!

Apple filters spam at the server level, which means you would never know if a spam was filtered out. All major email providers do the same. However, no spam filter is perfect. If a spam filter mistakenly identified an important message as spam and simply deleted it without giving you the ability to retrieve it, I think you'd be complaining even more.

It's a constant battle between spammers and ISPs. Spammers change their methods to defeat the filters, and ISPs have to analyse then update the filters to cope with the new spam, without affecting legitimate mail.

You obviously have no idea of how tricky it is to get the balance right.

I'v got this spam last night and I have no idea what am i going to do with it?

They send me the spam email every one hour through the whole night, which was really annoying.

I already set up rules in my icloud : add from : christine meyer to junk folder; add subject raspberry to junk;

but I think it wont work for this guy dont send spam via real email address and he can change this keyword at any time.

As apple icloud email dont let me find the whole email header, so i dont really have any choice on this problem!

I think this apple forum should be more aware about it, dont blame eache other, we need to find a way to kick it off.

If Apple would set up their email system so that I can decide (via a preference setting) whether emails "deemed spam" by Apple are either delivered to my Spam inbox or returned "undeliverable" to the sender, then that would eliminate the problem for me and many other folks who find it difficult to believe that we have to accept spamming, phishing, etc as a part of doing everyday business. If finding the right balance is too tricky for the ISP folks to figure out, then let the individual users draw the line. We can certainly do it without worrying about offending advertisers.

OPEDinMV wrote:

If Apple would set up their email system so that I can decide (via a preference setting) whether emails "deemed spam" by Apple are either delivered to my Spam inbox or returned "undeliverable" to the sender, then that would eliminate the problem

Spammers rarely use their own email address, they spoof someone else's so when you return the mail as undeliverable you just spam someone else. Why would you do that?

I'm concerned about the images, because I was unable to prevent them from loading. Were they attached to the message or were they loaded off the web with a unique URL so they could verify that they had sent the spam to a active email account?

I can't seem to find the setting to prevent mail from automatically loading images.

This is how it's done in Snow Leopard, probably basically similar in later systems:

Thank you! I found it in Mountain Lion. There's so much stuff in there, it was difficutl for me to find quickly.

I'm concerned by comment number 31 here, where someone has written:

I received this spam email and I am not on Icloud or @ me. I suspect it may be my apple ID email account that was compromised.

If this is true, then I think Apple needs to make a public statement about whether a database of Apple IDs has been hacked.