Increased SPAM

[murphyac1]

Recently, I have experienced a very large increase in SPAM with my Verizon account.  I used to get very little.  Today, I got 2 pieces of real mail and 13 pieces of SPAM.  I have activated the Verizon "Spam Detector", but it doesn't seem to be very effective.  I used to just download all my messages with a POPmail client, but now I am afraid that malware might sneak onto my computer.  Lately I have been accessing my Verizon email account on the web.  The SPAM messages seem to go right to my Inbox instead of to the "Spam Detector" folder.  I have to mark each piece of SPAM individually and then shift all those messages to the "Spam Detector" folder so I can delete them en masse.  Then I can use my POPmail client to download the real messages.

This is very different from my "gmail" account, which has a very good SPAM detector.  The SPAM messages never make it to my inbox.  If I didn't check the SPAM folder periodically, I would never see those messages.  The program very rarely makes a mistake, and if does, it is always on the side of caution - it occasionally puts a real message in the SPAM folder, but never puts a piece of SPAM in my Inbox.

Is there any way to make Verizon's SPAM detector more like that of gmail, or anyway much more effective than it is now?  It is really a pain if I have to make a list of SPAM email addresses, rather than if Verizon has a real SPAM detection program.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[jdjeff318]

EXACTLY....see my post in this thread 

http://forums.verizon.com/t5/Verizon-net-Email/Email-spam-incoming/td-p/669517

Verizon tries to pretend that they know nothing about it and when you call they start trying to get you to tell them about your operating system and just plain stupid **bleep** fixes, remarks and questions.  They KNOW about this and they REFUSE to do anything about it.  Just give customer support a call and see what I mean.

[murphyac1]

Since, Verizon's Spam Filter wasn't very helpful - had 8 SPAMs in Inbox, 1 real message in Spam Filter, I decided to try Mozilla's Thunderbird Junk Filter.  It uses Spam Assassin, which is very good, and has learning ability.  Now most SPAM messages go into the Junk Folder, and only real messages go into my inbox.  I can then right click on the Junk Folder and empty it at one go.  SPAM deleted, I'm happier than before, but still wish Verizon was more like Google mail, so I don't have to download SPAM messages.  By the way, Thunderbird is independent of any operating system.  It can be used with Windows or Linux and probably Mac OS.

Thanks for the reply.

[Ron888]

I've been getting overwhelmed by spam in the last few weeks too.  It's not that I'm getting more spam, the problem is that Spamdetector has gone from stopping about 50% to stopping less than 5%.  Since it also mistakenly stops about 5% of valid emails it's now totally useless.

This is very frustrating since my phone email account is now also getting useless because of all the spam.  I use Outlook at home which does a decent job on the garbage Verizon lets though.  (Although I recently switching from Outllok 2007 to 2013 and the 2013 spam filter is a lot worse than the 2007 version, and I'm thinking about switching back to 2007.)

I agree with those who think something has happened to the Verizon servers.  Maybe I'm getting paranoid but I've been wondering if spammers have penetrated verizon and sabotaged the servers.

I could switch ISPs to Time Warner Cable.  Does anyone know if the Time Warner spam filters work better than Verizon's?