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.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Setting up aggressive filtering policies
- 2Changing the users' primary SMTP address
- 3Routing incoming mail into a shared mailbox and manually filtering
- 4Using a smarthost service to tarpit the account
- 5setting up some aggressive filters and riding it out
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“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 ↗
“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 ↗
“*subscribes as I have 1 user in similar circumstances”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 3How to tell if a BEC attack was caught automatically or by a human
- 3How to stop excessive bot traffic and AI scrapers
- 2Why are wedding invitations taking weeks or months to arrive in the mail?