Said It Here

How to stop an email spam bomb attacking a user inbox

An ongoing email spam bomb floods a user's inbox with hundreds of random newsletter and phishing messages a day in multiple languages. This relentless wave buries legitimate communications and overwhelms standard inbox management, leaving administrators searching for effective filtering and mitigation strategies.

Overview
People affected3 accounts across 2 forums
Workarounds found5 items attempted
Community agreement21 total upvotes

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

Found another way around this?

Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.

  1. 1
    Setting up aggressive filtering policies
    Did this help you?
  2. 2
    Changing the users' primary SMTP address
    Did this help you?
  3. 3
    Routing incoming mail into a shared mailbox and manually filtering
    Did this help you?
  4. 4
    Using a smarthost service to tarpit the account
    Did this help you?
  5. 5
    setting up some aggressive filters and riding it out
    Did this help you?
Tried another approach not listed above?+ Share your workaround ↑

In their words

Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.

r/sysadmin2 people · September 2026

“I got two users getting hit with 100+ emails a day, mainly consisting of phishing/newsletter/spam all in different languages. Started up about three weeks ago and has not let up.”source ↗

Forward_Hedgehog2002 · r/sysadmin · 13 upvotes

“*subscribes as I have 1 user in similar circumstances”source ↗

BBO1007 · r/sysadmin · 1 upvotes
r/shopify1 person · September 2026

“The spam I have received in the past 2 days to my email after setting up my website with Shopify on Sunday is insane.”source ↗

“I even deleted the form and changed my email address associated with the Shopify account but I have received 20+ emails just today that are all the same crap.”source ↗

paidgun · r/shopify · 7 upvotes

Where this came up

People with this problem also raised