On my old e-mail address I'm currently receiving spam mails coming mostly from servers in China or Russia; this moring the same spammer was using a server in the US, though. I'm guessing that it's the same spammer, since the advertized products are always the same and the Return-Path is always "
bounce@google.com". The sender is more or less randomized, as usual.
At least that's what my new filters are for, my older filters might catch some other stuff that I don't see.
That account used to be a free e-mail account, but I started paying for it when it became the target of an e-mail worm called Gibe.F or Swen (the latter name comes from the fact that it was picking the e-mail addresses from Usenet, thus "News" backwards). That worm was masking as a Microsoft patch and had an attachment of roughly 300K.
At that time I was still using a modem for Internet access from home, and about an hour after work I started receiving one of these worms every few seconds. Basically every refresh of the web interface revealed a new e-mail from the worm.
At that time online filters were only supported for paying customers, so I started paying for the account, otherwise my quota would have been filled literally over night.
Even after they added automatic spam filters to the account, I still kept using my own filters, because that way I could delete obvious spam mails without having to look at them first. And often the automatic spam filters just didn't work that great.
Due to this I thought of switching to a different e-mail service several years ago, but lazyness won, when I thought of the number of web sites on which I would have to change my e-mail address.
Maybe three months ago I read a rumor that the e-mail service might be sold, which pushed me over, because I didn't want to provide some data collector with all my information.
Thus, I changed to a different main account about three months ago (also not free, but I pay half of what I used to pay for the other one and get more features). It took me a whole weekend to change the address on most web sites, but I still find the occasional one that I haven't changed, or worse, where I simply cannot change the e-mail address (yay!).
So far, no spam at all, but apart from those sites where I used it, not too many people know it yet.
But that e-mail service seems to have a lot of different measures against spam, and you can enable or disable each individually.
Interestingly enough, when I terminated payment for the old account, they disabled the possibility to create or edit filters that delete e-mails, before my contract offically ran out. The old filters still work though, which is why I'm not totally sure if they still delete spam or not.
My work-around is that I've defined a folder that stores the e-mails only for one day and use filters to move obvious spam mails there.
As for telephone spam... I guess robo-calls are even worse in the US.
So far I've only gotten only two spam calls on my phone number, but it isn't listed in any phone book.
The one that is listed in the phone book sometimes gets lots of spam calls and sometimes there is a drought.
For some reason the number of spam calls increased when we were forced to switch from ISDN to VDSL.
In Germany, starting this December, a new rule is enforced that the local carrier has to pass through the foreign phone number, so it's not as easy to spoof a local phone number. I guess the really smart ones will simply get some kind of relay station in Germany...
I'm already blocking several countries, because I only expect spam calls from them.
Another problem seems to be that some robo-callers seem to be broken.
I noticed that blocked phone numbers sometimes called dozens of times in the same minute. Then I checked what happens when a number is blocked. I thought one might get the message that the number doesn't exist, but you simply get the "engaged" tone.
I'm now diverting the blocked numbers to the answering machine instead. That seems to do the trick for now, until the spammers think of some other devious thing...
Short answer:
Yes, spam is an issue.
For e-mail I hope my new service will deal with that and I can kill the old account in one or two years.
For the landline I'm using number filters in the FritzBox.
I'm not really using a cell phone...
Addendum: Five spam mails by just that one spammer in less than 24 hours... Yes, there is increased spam at the moment!
