So this is why I'm finally canning 'hotmail' after all these years.

See the number of spams I got in the last ~24 hours.

I'm OK with the spam filter capturing them but unfortunately, a certain number of legitimate e-mails go into the spam folder and I have to actually look through them before hitting 'delete'. I'm thinking g-mail will be better.

 

Yup. My hotmail account is getting bad too. I've had it since 1997. There's a growing market for private email services (you have to pay for it) because of the espionage capitalism from the "free" email services. I have a couple of "free" email addresses and they're all getting pretty bad. I'm pretty sure I'll be dumping my "free" email address in the near future. It's no more difficult than changing ham call signs.

 

And something else I found is that Outlook, which is what hotmail is these days, has useless spam filters based on verbiage. So if I want to automatically delete anything that has, for example, "CBD", "male enhancement", "Congratulations!" or "Mortgage" in the header or body of the message, it doesn't help setting up those filters. You're wasting your time.

 

I have email that is associated with my web site. If you rent web space you get 100 email addresses free. I only use one. I don't get a lot of spam, but I still get some. It's mostly from the scammers that are trying to pry bitcoins from my grip. I use Thunderbird and POP3 to get the mail. The filters do seem to work pretty well.

I also use yahoo.com for email. I have several accounts there. I mostly use it for digests from the Yahoo Groups and Groups.io. I very seldom get any spam, but it does send some of the legit emails to the spam folder. I usually don't notice it until there is a inconsistency in some of the postings.

If you use Yahoo mail, here is a tip. I use folders to hold all of the email. So often, my in-box is empty. When that happens, Yahoo take the liberty of showing you something dumb in the empty space. To prevent that, I always keep at least one email in the inbox. Interesting enough, the email that I keep there is on the "Yahoo Security Breach Proposed Settlement".

 

Well if you get a lot of spam via email is really your own fault, but you can turn it into an advantage now that you have learned your lesson.

Keep your Hotmail account as a dummy account. Open a gmail account but do not use it other than approved contacts like friends and your bank. For all other web related accounts that require an email address, use your dummy Hotmail account to route the SPAM to.

 

Yes. Thanks! It's all my fault I get 100+ spams a day and that something like 45% of all bandwidth is used for spam.

And thanks too for the great suggestion that I keep hotmail after switching to another e-mail service. I look forward to continuing to sift through the 100+ spams I get a day to find the one that shouldn't be there.

Yes. I've learned my lesson.

 

I had NO idea that Hotmail was even still around!

Dave
W7UUU

 

They retired hotmail but converted over to Outlook a number of years back but let you keep your old hotmail address.

 

Gmail is far from perfect but it works for me. I have two email addresses. SPAM sometimes gets thru on one of them but never on the other. And its stuff that would be clearly identifiable as spam. Both of the SPAM boxes fill up quite regularly so they are catching them.

 

Sage advice except I'm not onboard with using Google anything these days. I certainly will no longer be using email services that require a phone number to sign up.