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Ask HN: Other hotmail users getting spammed?

1 points by wizofaus ↗ HN
I'll be the first to admit hotmail's junk filter has never been great but in the last few days it's been hopeless - receiving 4 or 5 emails a day in my "focused" inbox that are 100% obviously junk just from looking at the subject line (full of extra punctuation characters etc.). Anyone else seeing the same? I'd even pay to keep my hotmail account but with better junk filtering but it doesn't seem there's such an option...

5 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 20.9 ms ] thread
Trouble_007
Death by a thousand spams? ... a.k.a. Kill a service by making it undesirable?
LinuxBender
I do not see an uptick to hotmail addresses on my fake open relay honeypots. Could it be they adjusted their global filters recently or that your address ended up in more spammer lists?
wizofaus
The emails I'm getting are so obviously spam (nonsense subjects, sender addresses and frequently no text content) that I'm baffled how they don't get filtered, let alone wind up in my "focused" inbox.
LinuxBender
I am just guessing but it sounds like maybe they broke their global filters. I've seen folks on here saying they are seeing this behavior on gmail as well. I have not seen any evidence pointing to what the overall agenda would be if this is the case beyond pushing people off the free email services.

The conspiratorial side of me could imagine a memo amongst a circle of some business leaders pushing people to mail providers that have money trails. Or perhaps a more benign reason could be these companies are no longer making enough money on their whitelists or not making enough money from tracking email behavior and are silently dropping support of the free services.

wizofaus
I'm happy to pay for a decent junk filtering service that will work with hotmail, but I've yet to find one (I've tried a couple).

BTW most of the new spam messages come from a sender with the domain achildsplacelearning.com. Not sure if this is indicative of anything much: https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/192.124.249.5