One For Buenchico...

[MichaelZZ]

Good afternoon Chris
For some years now I have been using GMX for my emails. One of the reasons for this was the promise of virtually zero Spam. However, in the past week or so I have received more than a dozen such emails offering all sorts of rubbish that I can well do without (Bitcoin millions, loans and insurance, to name but a few). The common feature of these junk messages is the gibbersh sender address which begins "fyukyulygify.....@...". The other common feature is that they all bear a ficticious date of 1/12/06 (which in my date configuration equates to Jan 12th 2006).
All these messages are easy to spot for what they are and I know that I can move them to a Spam folder but what I would like is a way of stopping them at source.
I have emailed the GMX Help Desk and am awaiting a reply. In the meantime, is there anything that I can do?

[davegosling]

Are you able to set up a custom filter rule which checks the date of incoming email and delete it before it even reaches your inbox?

https://support.gmx.com/email/filter-rules/custom-filter-rules.html

[fiction-factory]

Filter or block rules hardly ever work in my experience- as soon as I filter bitcoin@abcde..
I get them from bitcoin2@abxcd then bitcoin@acbde..
Also, most of mine have no words in them to use as filter rules- the message text is hidden in an image.
Fortunately my email provided recognises them as spam as the vast majority go straight into that folder. I need to check my spam folder regularly though as occasionally non-spam emails end up there

[davegosling]

Are you using GMX, f-f?

[Hopkirk]

Just delete and do not respond in any way. They will stop after a while.

[Buenchico]

You need to consider how the spammers got hold of your address. If you've used a simple forename+surname pattern (e.g. [email protected]) they might have just guessed at it. [Spammers configure their computers to try millions of different potential addresses]. It's far better to use something like [email protected].

Also, if you're ever silly enough to click 'unsubscribe' on an unsolicited email from an address-guessing spammer, you'll have told him that your address is real and end up with lots more spam.

Alternatively you could have submitted your email address to either a dodgy site which sold it on to spammers or to a respectable site which has had its database hacked. That's why you should always use different addresses when signing up to things, or making purchases, on the internet. (GMX allows you to set up 10 'aliases', which divert mail into your main account. If one of the aliases starts getting spam you can simply disable it. If you need more email addresses you can simply register again).

Once you've started getting loads of spam it can be difficult to stop it (unless it's arriving at an 'alias' address, where you can simply disable it). However if you (and all other GMX users who're getting the same spam) keep clicking on the 'Spam' button (rather than just deleting it), GMX's servers will learn that it's stuff that nobody wants and simply direct it straight to your Spam folder. (Spammers also tend to give up sending junk out to a particular address after a while anyway). So it could just be a matter of 'giving it time'.

[MichaelZZ]

Thanks for those comments Chris.
I usually do totally ignore all the unsolicited stuff I get (fortunately not very much) but I did recently click "unsubscribe" to a site that I thought I recognised. Also, I took out a magazine gift subscription on what I thought was a bona fide site. It was a very good offer; perhaps it was too good.
I had a couple of alias addresses but for reasons that I have now forgotten (old age is getting to me!) I dumped these some time ago. It's probably time to resurrect them.
Thanks again for your comments - and to everyone else who has taken the time to reply - I'll divert the rubbish to my Spam folder and grit my teeth in the hope that the spammers will get fed up.

[Togo]

With GMX can you not enter the "domain" name of theses spam mailers in a blacklist file. I know they use a different email address if you block an individual email address, but I thought that GMX allowed you to block the "domain" that uses different mail addresses. I think that when you enter a domain onto your blacklist it needs to finish with "domain.com." So ignore the fyukyulygify......@ bit and enter the bit after @ then add domain.com. to it and blacklist.