Receiving extortion emails sent from my own Plusnet email address

[#1]

From what I understand, a catch all email is when the server is set up to divert any emails with an address which is incorrect for that domain.  However, the email address from which this email is sent is correct.  It is my email address.  So surely that course of action won't work form this situation.

Anyway, I have just gone to my Plusnet spam settings and blocked my own email address. Apparently it will take up to 48 hours to be enacted so I'll find out if it works over the next couple of days.  I will also find out if it causes any problems with emails sent to me or I send to others.  

[#2]

PlanetX - I've been with Plusnet for many many years (apparently I'm one of the company's oldest customers) but it's only this year that I've had this problem with extortion email campaigns.  After trying many things advised by customer services, the only suggestion they could come up with in the end was to change my email address.  You can imagine what this would entail after decades with the same email!  Then I was told that I would eventually have to do this anyway because Plusnet will be switching of its email hosting service.  Can you or anyone confirm that this is the plan? 

[#3]

@berylcuke : Then I was told that I would eventually have to do this anyway because Plusnet will be switching of its email hosting service.  Can you or anyone confirm that this is the plan? 

This 'claim' by some agents has been the subject of high-level discussion, and at this present time - no-one knows what the future holds -  it is pure speculation/bad advice/scare-mongering.

[#4]

Thanks Jab1. It would be an immense task to make a switch.

[#5]

A catchall is not so much a means of handling incorrect addresses, but more about addresses not explicitly defined.

The discussion on catchall arose from considering how one might identify the source of a leaked email address.

As for your current issue, you’ll just need to live with it for a while. Such abuse rarely lasts more than a couple of weeks … and there is very little you can do about it. Worrying about it will do you more harm than will the emails themselves.

[#6]

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@greygit1 wrote:

A domain with specified recipient addresses  (and no catch-all) is so much tidier (IMO).

 I run my own mail server with a number of domains. I use catch-all addresses for two reasons:

1. a mail rejection isn't sent so spammers can't identify real addresses
2. a random spam e-mail is likely to appear at an invalid address before a real address - which allows my spam filter to adjust to catch them before real addresses receive them.

Of course, users don't see the catch-all mails - only myself and the spam filter see them, so it still looks tidy from a user perspective.

[#7]

Sadly, although each scam email campaign only lasts a couple of weeks, they start all over again three or four weeks later when, once more, I will be bombarded with up to 50 emails a day for a couple of days before it starts tapering off.  It’s happened several times in the last few months and it’s a real pain in the rear end.  Hence my desire to find a way of stopping them from reaching my inbox. The Plusnet spam filter proved problematic as it kept capturing non-spam emails, some of which were important, despite putting the senders’ email addresses on the white list. Can’t win🤪.

[#8]

@berylcuke How many mail accounts do you have - just the on, or more? There may be a way of sorting this.

[#9]

@jab1 

[#10]

@Anonymous Nope - it is simple, but depends on the answer to my question as to the number of mailboxes/accounts the OP has.

[#11]

I have five email accounts. Three are work email addresses over which I have no control whatsoever, one is my Plusnet email which is used for everything else and I have a gmail address which I had to create to set up some Google things. The Plusnet email is the only one with which I have ever had scamming/spamming issues.

[#12]

So, based on that information, @berylcuke - have a look at https://www.mailwasher.net/ - the free version, which will only permit one address, looks as though it may work on your desktop/laptop for what you need.

There appears to also be a mobile version, but it has a very poor rating - there are better options for the mobile if you search the Appstore.

I'm afraid I don't have experience of the latest versions - I bought a life-time licence when it was a one-off payment, and it doesn't cover any version later than what I have - it is now a yearly subscription for the pro version, but (1) I didn't like the UI 'improvements' in V7 onwards, and (2) they won't work on my Linux system anyway.

[#13]

The best approach to any mail cleaning service is to run it on one device which is running all of the time … AND all devices connected to the same mailbox using IMAP.

[#14]

@berylcuke on your Plusnet mail, create an alias , say  'self' aliased to your normal mailbox. Then when sending yourself reminders use the email address self@<account>.plus.com. They will still appear in your normal mailbox, but you can now safely use a filter to junk any email where both the From and To are your normal email address!

[#15]

Again I ask - why complicate matters with send to self … when those emails are already in the sent items folder?

Send to self doubles the storage space of sent items … and in this case inhibits the opportunity to filter suspicious emails.