Contributor
•
55 Messages
2,000 spams in one day!
Anyone else having anything like this happen?? Started yesterday, continues today though at slightly less frequency. Most are coming into my Inbox, which I then mark as spam. Perhaps 20% are being caught by Comcast and go directly into spam. Any suggestions short of changing y email address. See attached screenshot.
Accepted Solution
BruceW
Gold Problem Solver
•
25.7K Messages
3 years ago
Proceed with caution! When scammers manage to hack into an online account, they sometimes "mailbomb" the account's recovery email addresses in the hope that the victim will be overwhelmed by the flood and won't see any "you changed your info" warning emails sent by the company managing the hacked account.
If an employee doesn't reply to your message here, Comcast Security Assurance should be able to help. You can reach them at 1-888-565-4329 (from https://internetsecurity.xfinity.com/help/report-abuse/). Note that this is NOT one of the general customer service numbers. The first-line reps there are sometimes not very helpful, so you may need to be persistent and keep at them until you get a satisfactory answer.
(edited)
0
Accepted Solution
Latoque
Expert
•
29.5K Messages
3 years ago
@RedLeft
"Reject with reason" is a feature unique to Comcast email. If you set up a filter for an individual sender that you want to discourage from sending to you, this feature lets you generate a pretty official looking "bounce" message they will get when they try to send to you again. You can put anything you want in it like "Account Inbox full", or an error message or anything else. I don't know of any other email provider that has this capability. There were a lot of requests for this feature back when Comcast was still using Zimbra for it's email software. When they switched over to the Appsuite program this came with it.
(edited)
1
Accepted Solution
Terry0327
Contributor
•
208 Messages
3 years ago
The time I got the email bomb in the middle of all the emails was a notice from my charge company I had bought a $900 Ipad on line. Watch your bank and charge cards carefully.
0
RedLeft
Contributor
•
55 Messages
3 years ago
BruceW, thanks much for the helpful info. I will proceed with caution, what you say makes sense. The volume seems to be going down now, and Comcast is catching a higher percentage. I've set up a filter to catch quite a few as well. (Do you know if there is a log file for e-mail filters, for a summary of their activity? For now I can turn it on and off to see if it's working, but a log would be much better.)
The flood is possibly/probably related to a credit card being compromised, they were hoping to hide alerts from the CC company. But who knows?
In any case, I've found a way to deal with it for the moment. Thanks for the Comcast link and phone number, I've got that saved off.
0
0
BruceW
Gold Problem Solver
•
25.7K Messages
3 years ago
That would be a good idea, but AFAIK there is no provision for logging filter activity.
0
RedLeft
Contributor
•
55 Messages
3 years ago
Thanks again.
BTW, in email filters do you know the difference between the actions "Discard" and "Reject with Reason"? I could test it, but I presume Discard goes into trash and Reject bounces back to sender. Not finding detailed documentation on this. I am rejecting the ones that I know for sure are B.S.
0
0
BruceW
Gold Problem Solver
•
25.7K Messages
3 years ago
I've never used either one, and AFAICT neither Comcast nor webmail subcontractor Open-Xchange has bothered to document their email filters.
My guess about "Discard" would be the same as yours. "Reject" is described briefly in https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/email/can-i-bounce-a-range-of-ip-addresses/60334b69c5375f08cd6e46ae?commentId=60334b70c5375f08cd6f4430.
Instead of using "Discard" I would recommend creating a Temp folder and using "Move to folder" "Temp" instead of "Discard" until you are confident the filter is working as you expect. Then you can just change the destination folder in that filter action from "Temp" to "Spam" or "Trash".
0
RedLeft
Contributor
•
55 Messages
3 years ago
Thanks again. I have done exactly what you suggest (temporary folder) in the past, but this time there were so many of them! There were two clear patterns that I could reject with certainty. However based on the logic discussed in your last link, I'll change reject to discard and see what happens. If they stay vanished from my standpoint, that's good enough.
Really appreciate your help.
0
0
RedLeft
Contributor
•
55 Messages
3 years ago
@Latoque
Thanks for the detailed explanation of "reject with reason". I assumed that was the case and put "Invalid email" as my reason. But, following BruceW's logic above I will change that Reject to Discard. There's no point sending anything back to spammers except a few choice four-letter words.
@Terry0327
That is exactly what happened to me, except I purchased a pair of $800 Gucci sneakers. Fortunately I caught that early in the process of being bombed, notified the card company, and that's all settled, awaiting my replacement card. But now it's certain that the false CC charge and the mail bombing were related.
The flood of spams is now down to a trickle, but it's possible they subscribed me to a some legitimate mailings. Will have to see what happens. Thanks for the help.
0
0