Is it just me, or has spam increased ten fold?

Emails, junk, phone calls have just exploded.
Or is it just me?

I haven’t noticed any increase in that stuff lately. You musta made the scamsters "easy mark list somehow.

Probably. I buy a lot of stuff online which would explain the email scams, but not the phone calls.

Just by “Temu” alone! I finally took the bait and ordered something. Has anybody else tried them?

No increase in Spam here. On some Spam email emails have a LIST-ID in the header and I have created a Thunderbird filter to eliminate it. This ID is probably from a mailing list someone has bought and lets them know where the email address came from.

I also have filtered certain sending domains like .SHOP and .EU and so on. There are a few non well-known domains that I allow but many of the new ones are favored by spammers because no one has filters yet. Google even recently started selling .ZIP and .MOV domain names which can be confused by recipients to open email that contain ZIP or MOV files and thus may have viruses. The Real Risks in Google’s New .Zip and .Mov Domains | WIRED

As for telephone calls, I have VOIP filters that stop calls during off hours, send some to voicemail, etc. I have a toll free number I use a few times a month. I get calls into it from telemarketers but I direct all calls to voicemail, which then emails me a voice file to listen to the message. If the file size is 1kb it means they heard the voice mail message and hung up. Thus I delete the message without even bothering to listen as it is blank. My VOIP phone has 1 GoogleVoice number, a local home number and two toll-free numbers. Essentually no calls recently that I can remember, so no, no increase lately.

There are many ways to eliminate spam calls and emails.

Lots more email junk, not really on phone calls.

If you signed up for Direct Marketing Preference, there is a time limit which may have passed. https://dmachoice.org Although they now charge a small fee. This stops bulk mail from many honest companies. It does not stop junk mail from unscrupolus ones. The site also offers the no-cost option to stop mail from being sent to someone who’s deceased.

Optoutprescreen.com should stop credit card offers, etc. It is sponsored by the credit reporting agencies.

A LOT more email spam and phishing in my hotmail account. My cellphone is getting more frequent spam and phishing texts also.

Me too. Hotmail gets 75-125…every…darn…day.

I don’t know what kind of anti-spam filters there are with hotmail, but Thunderbird can access and filter Hotmail and Yahoomail.

Quite a while back I decided to have my own domains and manage my own mail. With my own domais, I can have ‘a boatload’ of addresses all for a few dollars a year.

HM uses a spam filter and it works. Kind of. Of a 150-ish I get in a typical day. About half go to the spam folder and others to inbox. Pics are three ave weekdays.

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Scam ads on facebook has skyrocketed lately, not sure why all of a sudden.

Unless you can configure the spam filters, you are at the mercy of the company creating the filters. Perhaps they get paid for ads, which they then let through. That is why I like Thunderbirds filters that allow me to look inside the headers and block or flag whatever I want. Perhaps it is a LIST-IS or the sender, From, To, CC, BCC (domain) ends in .TOP or .IO or .SPACE, if the subject contains SEO (a marketing term) or many messages sent to a specific name at my organization who has never existed since I am a sole propriator.

I can flag groups of messages and add a STAR or put them in a specific “Possible Spam” folder, put into trash automatically or automatically delete and never see again. It only takes a minute to add a filter to never handle those types of messages again.

In Thunderbird I have configured and receive mail in over 60 email accounts. Some are mine, some are customers which allow me to set filters for them. Some of these accounts get hundreds of emails a day but a few filters elimininated almost all spoam messages and scams.

I can evn clean up accounts that have 10 years of saved emails pretty easily. There is an option to add a count of messages from a particular sender and sort by that number. Thus I see that I have 200+ messages from a company over the years that I no longer do business with and delete them all in a second or two. That allows me to pick the lowest hanging fruit (most messages) and free up the most space right away. That was necessary ina Gmail account that had reached its maximum space used and I needed to quickly make space so I didn’t have to pay Goole for more room.