Posted on 01/10/22
| News Source: Washington Post
Jaden Geller is giving up on his Gmail inbox. The 26-year-old security engineer in San Francisco has been battling an explosion of spam to his free email account for months, like mailing lists he never signed up for and obvious scams. He thinks the address has been comprised beyond saving.
“I was better about actually deleting spam messages at first, but then it became unmanageable,” Geller said. “I used to archive every single message. Now that’s too much of a hassle. I’m checking my inbox less frequently, not looking at everything, and leaving it in a messy state.”
Email spam is an old problem that many people may have forgotten about or, at least, made peace with. Thanks to improvements in automatic filters from email providers and third-party services, the early 2000′s onslaught of sketchy Viagra offers and promised contest winnings were mostly kept out of sight. The spam waterfall became a leaky faucet, with just a few iffy emails showing up in our inboxes alongside a bunch of legitimate marketing emails that are, often, our own doing.
But over the course of the pandemic – particularly in the past six months – many people using free-email services have noticed a surge of unwanted scam emails slipping through the filters and landing in their inboxes. Gmail users have been most vocal about the issue, and some are so overwhelmed with spam they’re trying to figure out what they can do about it. Fortunately, the Help Desk is here to help.
What’s the problem?
More spam than usual appears to be getting through the automatic filters on some free email services, particularly Google’s 18-year-old Gmail. According to cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, there has been a 30 percent increase in the volume of spam this past year across services. The company detected 10 billion additional spam messages in December alone.
Free email such as Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook and Hotmail, and Yahoo have built-in tools for detecting junk mail and moving them to another location (usually a folder called “Spam” or “Junk”) where you can still see them or ignore them forever. There are paid third-party filtering options for companies that host their own email but not many for the free email services that are used by billions of people around the world. On the other side of the issue is professional criminals and marketers, constantly looking for new ways to outsmart email filters and reach their targets.