I have been getting flooded with spam email for the last seven to ten days and it starts getting to my kister... I need help about how to stop or how to otherwise best deal with this seemingly unending flow of very suspicious email. All the messages or the vast majority of them seem to come from three or four different addresses when they are listed on my Inbox. But in the area where the messages are actually displayed, the "To" and "From" fields almost exclusively contain my email address (in both fields) and little more, exactly as follows:
From: wc2[space] [my email address] on behalf of Credit Cards* [space] [my email address]
To: [my email address]; [my email address]
* or other names, such as "Kohl's-Survey-Rewards", "Globe Life Offer", "Sex Offender Alerts-Kids Live Safe" and many others, always different with each new message.
Amazingly, none of these messages were being auto-filtered by Outlook's own filters, where my rare spam mail messages have usually been caught and automatically sent to the "Junk" folder. So I had to change my settings to "Exclusive" in order to have all these messages redirected to Junk instead of landing on my Inbox.
It's also worth mentioning that where messages are listed on the Inbox or Junk folders, the sender's name (certainly fictitious) shows under a few different variations, such as:
aig-G24DVXT1 @ douki.onalignment.com "You have received an amazing Credit Card notification!"
aig-G24DVXT1 @ msn.com "If you died tomorrow..."
aig-G24DVXT1 @ saharo.equipmentword.com "Battle Substance Abuse with Degree in Psychology"
uhuh-IJIDFFDSFFD1DZ @ APPLE.com "Saving money on your car insurance has never been easier"
aig-G24DVXT1 @ growthgreenes.net "You have been selected."
This is just a sample, because the messages are way too many, like 8 or 10 each day. And I separated the "@" from the rest of the text to avoid creating automatic links, as a precaution.
A couple of questions, please: Besides the obvious annoyance, inconvenience and loss of time, should I also be scared? And is there any way that I can get rid of these messages in a somehow more efficient, cleaner way than the way I am using now? And what about preventing them from getting to my email account in the first place?
All help will be greatly appreciated.
Outlook.com -- Windows 7-64 -- Firefox 35.0.1