iCloud spam emails are driving me crazy

Oh no! It must be Google's fault. Oh! It must be GoDaddy! Yeah! They did it! It can't be Apple. Beautiful, perfect, faultless Apple! And, therefore, Apple need not concern themselves if other "evil" providers exploit their services. What "buying habits"? Women's fury shoes? Fancy handbags? Cheque's in the post Csound1. I think we all know this debate must take place beyond Apple's pages.

Then, take it beyond Apple's support pages. However, if like the OP you are in the habit of confirming YOUR email address by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the spam email, then you will forever have an issue with spam. This is true of all email provider, be it Apple, or any other provider.

You can stifle the people some of the time but you cannot stifle all of the people all of the time. Unless you're Apple, perhaps?

I have no intention or reason to stifle you. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care about your opinion.

Nicholas Baker wrote:

Oh no! It must be Google's fault. Oh! It must be GoDaddy! Yeah! They did it! It can't be Apple. Beautiful, perfect, faultless Apple! And, therefore, Apple need not concern themselves if other "evil" providers exploit their services. What "buying habits"? Women's fury shoes? Fancy handbags? Cheque's in the post Csound1. I think we all know this debate must take place beyond Apple's pages.

You can believe whatever you want, you're the one with the spam problem, not me.

Ciao

This has nothing to do with Apple being hacked or your iCloud being hacked or Apple security. It does have something to do with using your primary iCloud email address for shopping, subscribing to email lists, etc.. Or, the easiest way for spammers to get your email address is to just compile a list using the most common first and last name combinations with numbers, nicknames, etc. No hacking involved. Take the last name Baker, add an initial at the beginning for each letter of the alphabet, and then add a number 1 to 100 at the end and they've come up with 2600 email addresses just for iCloud.com. If someone reads or clicks unsubscribe in the email, that particular email is confirmed as valid.

Yes, I accept that possibility, Jim,

And I'm first to suppose my suspicions about Apple unjustified. I also accept that I may have made a mistake trying to unsubscribe from this spam. However, here's where my credulity is a little stretched. I'm supposing that there were malicious people who got hold of my email address (via the methods in your post or otherwise) make it their business is to sell my address and others on to retailers who hope to sell me this high-value stuff by bombarding my inbox. I didn't imagine they might be the same people. You know: international data hackers and Uggs retailers on the side. For some reason--god only knows why--these guys think this marketing approach will work when almost anybody they meet in the Western world will explain that it doesn't. Still they persist. As you say, by trying to unsubscribe, I confirmed a genuine email address, right? But I was getting bombarded with their stupid spam by then, anyway. I had tried numerous times to block them using Apple's Rules with no success. Given that, I felt I'd not much more to loose by trying to unsubscribe because, stupidly, I supposed that even exquistley evil, retail masterminds, such as these guys, might give up if they're simply not selling anymore bloody Ugg boots.

None of this would have been necessary if Apple's Junk and Spam filters were up to scratch.

Nicholas Baker wrote:

Yes, I accept that possibility, Jim,

And I'm first to suppose my suspicions about Apple unjustified. I also accept that I may have made a mistake trying to unsubscribe from this spam. However, here's where my credulity is a little stretched. I'm supposing that there were malicious people who got hold of my email address (via the methods in your post or otherwise) make it their business is to sell my address and others on to retailers who hope to sell me this high-value stuff by bombarding my inbox. I didn't imagine they might be the same people. You know: international data hackers and Uggs retailers on the side. For some reason--god only knows why--these guys think this marketing approach will work when almost anybody they meet in the Western world will explain that it doesn't.

But it does work, to the tune of many billions worldwide

That is why it continues, because it works. And it does so whether or not "most people in the Western world" explain!

You didn't think that they did this for free did you?

I'll just deal with this Csound1 and then really must move on to more helpful discussions.

You're probably right to say that it does work "to the tune of billions" but they're certainly not making any money out of me. Given that Apple cannot assist me in blocking this stuff (something I had mistakenly imagined they could do) I have to fall back on the base logic of market behaviour for my salvation. Permit me to set out the argument in a dialogue between, let's say, an imaginary counter-faker boss and his technical director:

Counter-faker Boss: "Need to sell more fake Uggs! What can we do, technical director?"

Technical Director: "Never fear, Boss! I buy fiendish algorithm that generates millions of possible email addresses. Many are false fishes but some are golden Carp!"

Boss: "How so?"

Tech Dir: "Those fools that press the 'unsubscribe me' button are genuine living email addresses, Boss. Ingenious! You have mailing list of real people at last!"

Boss: "You mean I have mailing list of real people who don't want my Uggs!"

Forgive the Fu Manchu business, please, but it makes this point: what is the point in acquiring--with great guile and ingenuity--a list of bona-fide people who definitely don't want to buy your products? Either these guys are infinitely stupid--which I doubt--or the whole wise-acre stuff about never clicking the unsubscribe button is a misnomer as, indeed, is the sage advice about surf hygiene. It is immaterial to these guys whether you unsubscribe or not. That's just another prop to make their spam look like genuine offers from a genuine retailer. The only responses they're interested in are from those perhaps many thousands of randomly correct emails sent to folk who don't mind that these are obviously fake products and don't care if their email accounts are spammed until they glow.

If my reasoning is correct, there's nothing any of us can do once the algorithm has guessed our email addresses other than to have top-notch spam and junk protection from our email provider.

That is correct, once your address is on the list you have to deal with a system that is responsible for sending over 100 billion spam emails a day, with an 'estimated' revenue of $8 billion. They won't stop and stopping them is a daunting task, one that is extremely difficult to stay ahead of.

eg: The unsubscribe button. In many cases it does exactly what it says, in others it does not. That is all it takes to make all unsubscribe buttons untrustworthy.

As for help, only you know what constitutes spam to you. If you were looking for a pair of RayBans an ad for them would not (at the time) seem like spam, to you.

Add that to the senders ability to spoof any addresses they like, change them with each send, vary the subject and content etc ... It's a fast moving target.

Good luck