Suddenly inundated by phishing emails

[mancesco]

Hi everyone, I'm suddenly being inundated by pretty obvious phishing emails that somehow make it through GMail's spam filter. I know for a fact that my email address had been part of a security breach some time ago and I wonder if this might be related (I have since changed my passwords regularly).

 

I already take the usual precautions with my online accounts (unique psw, 2fa, don't subscribe to dodgy services), but I wonder if I should take additional steps in light of these recent emails.

[adarw]

cant you just block them?

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

Just give them your name, address, and credit card info and they'll leave you alone after that. That's what I always do.

 

/s

[Eigenvektor]

15 minutes ago, mancesco said:

I know for a fact that my email address had been part of a security breach some time ago and I wonder if this might be related (I have since changed my passwords regularly).

Sounds like the most likely cause, unless you suddenly entered your email on a bunch of mailing lists. One of my emails was in a leak a year or so ago and it received a ton of spam for several months following that.

[mancesco]

1 hour ago, adarw said:

cant you just block them?

I do every time but the sender is always different and with different excuses to try and get my data.

[mancesco]

52 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Sounds like the most likely cause, unless you suddenly entered your email on a bunch of mailing lists. One of my emails was in a leak a year or so ago and it received a ton of spam for several months following that.

Mmh, so nothing to do but marking them as spam and blocking them?

[Eigenvektor]

9 hours ago, mancesco said:

Mmh, so nothing to do but marking them as spam and blocking them?

Pretty much, yes. Train your spam filter and ignore them otherwise. Any other interaction will just confirm this is a live email address that's worth spamming.

[chrono76]

On 8/25/2021 at 12:50 PM, mancesco said:

Hi everyone, I'm suddenly being inundated by pretty obvious phishing emails that somehow make it through GMail's spam filter. I know for a fact that my email address had been part of a security breach some time ago and I wonder if this might be related (I have since changed my passwords regularly).

 

I already take the usual precautions with my online accounts (unique psw, 2fa, don't subscribe to dodgy services), but I wonder if I should take additional steps in light of these recent emails.

Seems like nobody has suggested it yet.
You should really consider trying an aliasing email service. In case you don't know, an email alias basically forwards your emails from a random address given to you (or chosen by you, depending on the service), like "random5846@simplelogin.co" to your main email account.

If you use Firefox as a web browser, Firefox Relay works quite well.

However  there is something even better. https://simplelogin.io

It is an open source alias service that gives you 15 aliases for free, its extremely good and you should try it out. And the paid version is definitely worth it!

If one of those aliases starts to get spam, not only can you recognize who is sending it, you can simply disable that specific alias, and your main account will not be getting any of it anymore!

 

There are other aliasing services like https://anonaddy.com but I have not tried that one.