Deluge of 'failed email' spam
When the same thing happened to me, I was receiving many SPAM messages a second over many hours.
They were coming in so fast that my email client was so overloaded that my PC almost ground to a halt.
What I did to take back control was -
1.) Disconnect from the internet - to stop further message downloads.
2.) Used my POP3 email client to view some sample SPAM messages in "raw source view" mode.
3.) I looked for common word patterns that only occurred in those unwanted message headers.
4.) I used the email client's built in filtering rule tools to identify the unwanted patterns in the message headers so they could be identified whilst the messages were still on the remote Plusnet server.
5.) Then if a message header was one of the unwanted ones, then I forwarded the message to the Plusnet 'abuse' mailbox and then deleted the original from the Plusnet server.
6.) If a message was not one of the unwanted, then I had a rule to download those using POP3 to my PC - as normal.
7.) Having identified the unwanted patterns, I then wrote another set of filtering rules to clean up my local INBOX of all the thousands of messages that had already been downloaded.
8.) Reconnected to the internet, and just let it run.
Within a few minutes, my local INBOX was back to normal, and the remote incoming filter rejected any new unwanted messages BEFORE they were downloaded to my PC.
Fortunately this has not happened too often, and most of my problems were just after Plusnet was hacked a couple of years ago, when all the customers email addresses were stolen
They were coming in so fast that my email client was so overloaded that my PC almost ground to a halt.
What I did to take back control was -
1.) Disconnect from the internet - to stop further message downloads.
2.) Used my POP3 email client to view some sample SPAM messages in "raw source view" mode.
3.) I looked for common word patterns that only occurred in those unwanted message headers.
4.) I used the email client's built in filtering rule tools to identify the unwanted patterns in the message headers so they could be identified whilst the messages were still on the remote Plusnet server.
5.) Then if a message header was one of the unwanted ones, then I forwarded the message to the Plusnet 'abuse' mailbox and then deleted the original from the Plusnet server.
6.) If a message was not one of the unwanted, then I had a rule to download those using POP3 to my PC - as normal.
7.) Having identified the unwanted patterns, I then wrote another set of filtering rules to clean up my local INBOX of all the thousands of messages that had already been downloaded.
8.) Reconnected to the internet, and just let it run.
Within a few minutes, my local INBOX was back to normal, and the remote incoming filter rejected any new unwanted messages BEFORE they were downloaded to my PC.
Fortunately this has not happened too often, and most of my problems were just after Plusnet was hacked a couple of years ago, when all the customers email addresses were stolen