OT: Winner of Multiple Competitions

Aren't they just! I've recently had a flood of scams from e.walgreens telling me my Norton and McAfee subs have expired (I don't use either). They seem to have dried up recently, but others keep coming, like a couple in the last two days purporting to come from Martin Lewis and offering investment advice.

There was a time when competent ISP's filtered out these things, but not at the moment, it seems.

Apparently Santander are updating their IT systems requiring me to log in and confirm my details.

I have never banked with abbey national or Santander though and I am suspicious that I recently used my debit card in a few new places to make contactless purchases.

Meanwhile, an email relating to a cousins death was regarded as spam by BT email so I didn't get it (I use Tbird).

There must be a way of telling BTemail to pass on all emails and let my Tbird filters deal with them ?. Another job to do.

those black bastards will try anything to con us ....

The worst scams are parcel non delivery ones that look identical to the genuine ones that the actual couriers do use.

BTemail servers are exceptionally stupid they sometimes bounce email from their own servers as "forgeries".

You may be better off with a non-ISP email service even if it actually costs money. One day they will discontinue providing it.

Vodafone nuked the Demon subdomains in the middle of the Covid pandemic.

Something like 99%+ of emails sent every day are filtered out - what you see in your inbox are just the spam dregs that remain (plus a few legit ones).

Even if you use your ISPs email service, its always more sensible to user your own domain to forward messages to it. That way if it is ever withdrawn, or turns out to not be good enough, or you simply want to change ISP, you get to keep your address, and can seamlessly transition to a new provider.

You can whitelist addresses and domains in the BT webmail portal - those settings should still be effective when using a desktop client. .

(Lots of the BT spam filtering is done as ingress filtering though. So most spam will not even get delivered into their system or your spam folder in the first place).

as will many other hues!

Although I did trace a Nigerian one the other day. A customer got in touch to say his email had been hacked (it was only a matter of time - micky mouse passwords, re-used on multiple sites), and all his contacts were getting messages impersonating him asking for a favour.

So when I got mine, I thought it would be time to have some fun and practice my social engineering :-)

So I responded, and got the sob story that he was away from home but needed someone to go buy a £100 gift card for him so he could give it to his niece for her birthday.

Anyway after several days of him having trouble using the gift card I bought him (and him unwittingly giving up his location, ISP, IP address, and the make and model of iPhone he was using), he stopped speaking to me when I told him I had delivered the card to his niece for him and now he owed me a favour!

I would prefer a generic "pass all received emails to me" option and I will let Tbird decide what action to take.

My Spam folder has 20 very obvious dodgy emails today, compared to half a dozen that made it to Inbox. (And half of them are "acceptable" spam). So I would not doubt the 99% figure.

But did you get the I Phone? I think I'd have sold it on myself. Brian

Yes well, its a lot of trouble to go to to piss off con artists, Best plan is just to ignore them.

One guy wrote to me recently with a pre written review of his service for me to submit to a web site via Wordpress. Not only did I not know of him, even though he was offering a payment, but I'd not be touching his patented horse racing system with a long barge pole either. Horse racing, really? Brian

To the best of my failing memory BT took away the whitelisting facility and stopped putting spam in the spam box deeming their systems to be intelligent enough to not have false positives. I had some disappointing direct contact with the head of their email services who also argued that POP3 was defunct technology.

Their Community boards soon filled up with people complaining that expected mail, from reputable sources, wasn't getting through. I changed my email provider to another free one that gave me better control of the settings and sent me a notification if there was mail in spam when I checked via POP3.

My wife and I have a joint gmail a/c and it is set to forward emails to her btinternet mail - which has started rejecting the long standing emails from our local council. I have now discovered that the whitelist is back (or maybe it never went away) and have whitelisted that council's address so as not to get trapped by bt's super intelligent spam detection.

The big problem is how to know what emails haven't arrived? I may have notification that I've won millions, or a free iPhone and don't know about it.

I do bank with Santander, and get annoyed when I get phishing emails to a unique address that was only ever given to Abbey National, and another to Alliance & Leicester.

Recently I also got an email to an address unique to HMRC which had this URL embedded in the email:

I sent the email to: snipped-for-privacy@hmrc.gov.uk as per HMRC instruction and told it was legitimate. After some toing and froing with the phishing people I finally got:

"We're sorry that we sent you an email about urgent Anti Money Laundering Supervision earlier today. We sent this by mistake, there is no need to take any action, please delete that email."

You really can't make things like this up.

BTW, is there a connection with Churchill Insurance and Direct Line?

Let us know when you work it out.

Jonathan

BT mail is designed to give complete numpties a 'safe enjoyable user experience'

If it doesn't work for you, then their attitude is 'f*ck off then'

Why anyone with any computer nöus uses it, beats me.

get a domain with e.g. 123 and set up your own email - 99p a month

That gets you from one extreme to another. To no filtering whatsoever.

Which, in my experience, with an E-Mail address that has been the same for many, many years, works very well.

I get maybe a dozen spam/junk mails to my main E-Mail address per day which are really no issue since I just hit 'd' and they're gone. I can cope with hitting 'd' a few times every day. :-)

I do also look through (programmatically, not personally!) all the E-Mail that arrives at my isbd.co.uk domain. Looking at the log there seem to be about 5 messages every half hour.

The catch was a £3 delivery.