Is there anything I can do about this sudden barrage of junk mail?

You can start a new email account.

Nooooo…that’s not what I was hoping to hear. Is this account beyond saving?

@raum Well if you have the time you can block, and unsubscribe, to each email one at a time.
Edit: your details say that blocking doesn’t help. I am at a loss for his to help you.

Maybe you can hire a teenager, or someone with lots of free time, to remove all spam one at a time.

Sigh. You’re probably right. I just need to keep doing it one email at a time. :/

@raum I have an idea. You can make a file folder for your legit emails to automatically go in to it, and go delete all for the spam.

Good suggestion. But I don’t want to filter legit but new senders to the junk folder. :/

@raum Then I suggest that hire a teenager thing. I’m tapped out of ideas.
I see the spam as an opportunity for a business. Manual removal of spam. Just as important as snow removal.

You can try setting up filters that automatically move incoming email with certain matches to a spam folder. Of course that requires a bit of care, and for the spam to have some patterns you can find in the content.

@Zaku How do I do that?

Do you have GMail? If so, it should be sorting all the spam into a promotions folder or spam file where you can delete it.

I have a gmail account. Though the beleaguered account is hotmail. I don’t want to give up on it, since friends from high school and college have this as my contact.

I don’t know if this would work in Hotmail, but what I do in Horde is blacklist the incoming junk until I have a list of maybe a few dozen and then sort it to see if there are repeat senders or keywords. Then I create a filter for those categories. I send them to trash but not marked ‘deleted’, so I can check and modify my filter if it’s catching real stuff.

It happened to me too about six days ago. Each day I move all of them to junk, then I block all of the senders. Each day since has been less. The first day there were around 30. Today there were six.

@SnipSnip Huh…about six days ago is about the same time frame for me too. Is your account hotmail? Wondering if it’s a hotmail issue?

@Jeruba It’s so interesting to hear that people keep junk mail to check and modify their filters. I really should start doing this too.

Do we know if there’s a feedback loop that lets spammers know when they’ve been blocked or shunted straight to trash?

@raum, I don’t keep the junk mail itself longer than it takes me to glance it over and make sure it’s not real. I save the sender information by way of the blacklist. Also if some spam has recurring keywords, such as “binoculars” or “erectile,” that I know is not from my cousin or the library, I create a filter for that.

Go to you privacy controls of acct where web activity etc is displayed also contact provider of that either Google or hotmail for security suggestions etc

@raum Yes it is. And today I had only one piece of junk in my inbox.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Hotmail-Customer-Support-RVW17229155.htm

Microsoft owns Hotmail
see link to customer service for Hotmail problems

Recycle.

You can use Gmail as your email client with a hotmail account. It will use Google’s spam filters to divert messages to the spam folder.

I have email accounts with Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook and I read them all by logging into a single Gmail account.

https://appuals.com/how-to-access-your-hotmail-emails-from-your-gmail-account/

@Call_Me_Jay Didn’t know you could do that. Thanks!

@raum Sorry, I just noticed you asked about setting up filters in Hotmail. Did you figure it out?

Thanks for checking in, Zaku!

For some reason all the junk mail stopped. And I hadn’t gotten around to tweaking my settings or anything yet. (Distracted at home because one of my kids is home from school because of quarantine.)

Glad you’re not still under bombardment. Even better when the spam stops by itself! ;-)

Is that normal though? To suddenly get 20–30 a day. Then have it just stop on it’s own? Weird. Maybe hotmail fixed the glitch.

It is normal if/when there is a specific spammer group that added your email to their target list, and then changed their list to one that doesn’t include your email, or they stopped spamming (for the moment). Spammers do sometimes operate in waves, and sometimes specific ones stop or are blocked or blacklisted.

I’m learning so much about junk mail and spammers on this thread. Still going to employ the suggestions to head off the next wave of spammers.

Thanks, everyone. :)

Unexpected perk of barrage of junk mail: newfound appreciation for my junk mail free inbox.