So, instead of having say, four mailboxes listed under settings, it has eight. Two for each email account. I didn't do it. It just happened.

And, come to think of it, it seems I am seeing emails I thought I had already trashed.

When it gets that wiggy, I'd suggest deleting all email accounts and adding them back again. Make sure you have other copies of emails you need of course before doing that.

If I delete the accounts, will I get to keep my contacts?

I saw a similar situation occur when a friend set up his internet accounts on his Mac and subsequently turned on mail synching in iCloud. As near as we could figure out the two different sets of ccounts were not recognized as duplicates — probably because he had capitalized the account address on one device and not on the other. The fix was to make the capitalization the same and the second set of accounts disappeared. Normally I use myy desktop computer as the account setup "master" and the setup on my iPhone and iPad follows suit through the iCloud synch.

Deleting an internet account on your iPad does not delete the account on the host server, it just prevents your iPad from accessing the data on the account host server until the account is re-established on the iPad. Normally messages, contacts, etc. associated with the account are stored on the account host server. You can verify the data is on the account host server by logging on through the account's web interface.

Isn't there an app like disk utility so I don't have to nuke things every time the iPad gets "wiggy?"

PS: I don't use an iCloud account.

A "disk utility" for an operating system that does not have a Finder or file system in the conventional sense is a non-starter. iOS sandboxes everything to the max and data files are encapsulated in the creating app's sandbox. Even iCloud retains a semblance of that data isolation in the way it handles iOS app files.

However, when things get wonky try pressing and holding the on/off button and the home button until the screen blanks and the white Apple appears on the screen. Release the two buttons and wait patiently until the system resets. This is a non-destructive process and not the same as shutting down and then booting. There are reset options in Settings > General but most of those are at least partially destructive and require resetting lots of stuff.

Help! I deleted the email accounts because they got 'wonky' as described above in this thread and now I can't put them back in and get them to work. I cannot completely clear EVERYTHING that was associated with the account including the SMTPs and start clean.

a visit to see a Genius at an Apple Store may be in order at this point

I don't like that answer very much . Anyone other ideas?

So maybe a little more detail: how did you delete the accounts and what happens when you try to "put them back in and get them to work."

Ok, so I finally got them back, not worth going into detail how, but 1,649 emails that I had deleted downloaded again from the server. So, my question is, do I have to click 'edit' and then mark each one for delete or go down the list and trash them as they open? I read in another forum that Grelber uses a car and a baseball bat to empty mailboxes quickly. Any less extreme suggestions?

Can't you just select them all and delete them in one shot?

How? No shift key?

Are you trying to do this from the All Inboxes screen? If so, try going back to Mailboxes and selecting one account at a time. I have only an iCloud and a Gmail account on my phone, and when I view the inbox for each individually, clicking Edit enables three options at the bottom of the screen: Mark All, Move All, and Trash All (or, in Gmail, Archive All).

But there are new messages since I put the boxes back that I want to have for a while. I don't want to delete everything in every mailbox, just big gobs at once. Maybe I have to mark all and then unmark the 50 or so new ones and then delete the marked ones?

And there is nothing in my sent box. And how do I mass empty my 'to' and 'cc' boxes? Is there something I am missing here?

I've removed several off-topic posts so this thread can get back to troubleshooting.

slolerner, can you give us a status update on your iPad mail problems?

Good. That's the suggestion I was just trying to post. Thanks.

Ok, so I deleted all the mail at once, but then, boom! it all downloaded from the servers again (POP Mail.) so I emptied the servers. Ok, back to normal, but two questions remain:

1) How do I delete a continuous bunch of emails at once, but keep the ones I want, like on my MBP where I hit shift on the first and last and command to deselect the ones I want. Note: I don't even want to select some of them because that opens them and they are spam. I was successful getting rid of a lot of spam by using LS on my MBP and blocking the ports they were requesting. I believe that did work. Now it is a different account getting spammed.

2) When I deleted the box marked 'To or CC' it deleted all the mail in my inbox. So, the question is, can I just get rid of, read "don't show" that mailbox? If I do that, will that stuff go away when I delete incoming mail or will it just pile up and fill up my iPad, which is only a 32gb.

Note: DK, I did go back to individual boxes instead of all and saw more options, but still not what I want.

In iOS 9.1 Mail

1. Navigate to the mailbox you want to empty
2. Save the desired messages into another mailbox
   1. Go to one of the messages you want to save
   2. Touch it and move your finger to the RIGHT
   3. Touch Move
   4. select a folder to contain the saved message
   5. repeat the process for each of the messages you want to save
3. At the top of the window click on Edit and a selection dot will appear next to each of the messages
4. At the bottom of the window touch Trash All
5. Confirm Trash All

Can I add a 'Keep These' mailbox at the top level? When I go to add mailbox, it only gives me the option to add a mailbox under each account.

That seems like an awfully cumbersome, uncharacteristically Apple way to accomplish a task that many people probably do several, if not numerous, times daily.

There's really no other way to partially delete the contents of a mailbox?

I think I just answered the second part of the question. It was a glitch that the 9.1 update fixed. I was having problems with mailboxes showing the wrong amount of mail, like something was in a mailbox when it was empty. When I empty the mailboxes now, the 'cc and to' folder empties as well.

Remember iOS does not have a file system per se. All files end up embedded in the application package and in the case of Mail must be associated with a given email account. However, you could do it on your Mac using a folder On My Mac, but those would ONLY be on your Mac and not accessible on any iOS device.

I was responding to Slolerner's specific situation where there were hundreds(?) of messages to be deleted and a relative few to be saved and was not intended to be a comprehensive tutorial covering all possible situations.

If one is cleaning out the mailboxes daily or hourly you can individually select the messages to be deleted and then press Delete.

IF you had, and regularly used, an iOS device running iOS 8 or later you would be more likely to understand that although iOS and OS X both run on the Darwin kernel their different operating environments, I/O tools, etc impose significant logical, and very reasonable, differences between two platforms. If you seriously want to learn more about iOS watch for the forthcoming release of iPhone: The Missing Manual, 9th Edition.

Actually, there were over a thousand messages.

I had mentioned that I don't want to open the messages that are junk because I am using LS on my MBP (when I can sit at it) to stop spam. You can't mark an email on an ipad for deletion until you click on it and that opens it, so it won't work. On my mac, I now get the LS window when junk mail tries to load and I block the port before it loads. It's just cumbersome to go into each account to place save messages on the iPad, but I can keep them all in a new folder under one account, I guess.

So, one other thought but probably won't work: if I flag the ones I want, will that keep them from being deleted during a dump?

If I did have a bluetooth keyboard, would I be able to shift and select? Just a thought... Probably a dumb one.

Thought that was the case but I didn't want to exaggerate.

That is a limitation in Mail that I do not know a workaround for. I will risk sounding like a broken record and say that there is an easy work around in Airmail.

Nope

Not a bad idea but that doesn't work either. I just tried it on my iPad with an attached bluetooth keyboard.

I've been wondering whether an attached keyboard would regain lost functionality.

I imagine that your "no" is across the board.

You misunderstand, joemikeb, you solved it with your instructions. I was explaining to Artie505 why it had to be done this way, because you can't delete a message without selecting it, which automatically opens it. Something I would rather not do because I do not want to open spam on the iPad. You can only delete it without opening it by deleting ALL, so taking out what I want and then doing a delete all would basically work. A few loose ends I can deal with.

Got it. Thanks! (Perhaps one of the reasons for the continuing decrease in iPad sales?)

I'm missing something here. Why can't you go to the All Inboxes screen, click Edit, tick the circle next to each message you want to delete, then click Trash?

Cuz it opens the email to even mark it for delete. I noticed that on the MBP as a difference between 10.6 and 10.7. You don't get a list and double click to open each email, they just automatically open. Or am I missing something here? On my MBP, which has LS, as a spam email comes up LS starts asking for ports and I deny them. I did this for awhile on one of my email accounts, and it did clean it up. But if I open a spam email on the iPad, I would never know what ports it is using or be able to block them.

Clarity: LS cleaned up that account and there is very little spam on that account ON THE IPAD ALSO. Now another account is being spammed.

What have you done to anger the gods?!

I ask myself that question a lot lately...

I started thinking about this, and both of those accounts are from the same provider, my other accounts are completely clean. Hmmm...

I think the culprit is EarthLink, that they may have released email addresses. It shouldn't be surprising, whenever you call tech support the first thing the overseas support asks you for is your password. Say whaaa? I've told US support about this. Does anyone have any suggestions here about how to complain about these spams without tech support just telling you to put some kind of challenge-response on it and make it the problem of those people legitimately mailing me?

Are you inextricably tied to Earthlink?

Yes. i've had those addresses for over 15 years. The first account that got spammed was not surprising, it's the account I use the most. The second one is a more private email address, friends, etc

Can I set up a script to forward them to spam@earthlink.net? I think I have to keep bouncing them back to EarthLink until they get the message.

I doubt that spam@earthlink.net is a valid address, but I don't suppose it can hurt to try.

Verizon gives me the option to move spam into a "Spam" mailbox, but I've got to log in to do it...PIA, but usually productive.

Doesn't Earthlink offer you a similar means to designate mail as spam for them to investigate?

I would have thought that Earthlink would have a built-in mechanism for doing such. (Or am I missing something?)

You could also set up parallel email accounts with another provider (eg, Gmail), have your Earthlink email messages forwarded to same, and then relegate them to Gmail's spam folder via filters. A little roundabout but workable.

Brilliant! Simple. Google will pick them off so easily, most are coming from .edu domains. Just have to reply from my EarthLink email address. Can probably set that up somewhere...

Gmail can be configured so that when you reply to a message that Gmail has "fetched" from another account the reply will appear to come from the original account. I know that will work using the Gmail web interface but I don't know if that will work when you are using a local client like Mail to access the messages.

The plot thickens. So, I called the college IT department where most of these more fast and furious spams are coming from. They are being spoofed and there are attorneys involved. I was instructed to forward the emails to the IT department.

eku.edu, by any chance?

Ding ding ding

They were making my life miserable, and for the first time ever, Verizon failed to deal with spam. (Verizon used to allow me to blacklist domains, but that option is no longer available. Booo!)

Luckily, though, the spam was all coming to my TrashMail account, so I simply deleted it and created a new one. Problem solved!

(I maintain an e-mail address specifically for those entities that have no business asking for one but demand one anyhow...the entities that are most likely to be sources of spam.)

Edit: After a while I began forwarding the e-mails to webmaster@eku.edu, but I never heard back and finally got bored and deleted the account.

Perhaps someone could explain why eku.edu (Eastern Kentucky University) seems to be a hot bed of spamming. On the surface it would seem to be a reputable place, but from the latest discussion here it would seem not.

The best I can do is repeat slolerner's "They are being spoofed and there are attorneys involved." (Emphasis added)

I'm sure that some input from tacit would be helpful.

I wonder if anybody else will report similar eku.edu spam or could it be more or less limited to New Yorkers, perhaps originating from some website that we're more likely to visit than non-NYers?

As Artie505 said, they are being spoofed and have not been able to stop it despite their efforts. As Artie also said, Verizon did not/could not filter it despite many complaints. It's not local and the emails are not for local services or products. They are hitting email providers.

That clarification muddies the waters.

Of my five Verizon e-mail accounts, why only the "insecure" one?

And how do they know my alternate user name? (Some of the spam was addressed [Edit: in the body of the e-mail] to abc from abc@verizon.net, which I never use as my name, and some was addressed to xyz, which I use only when posting with the abc address and is in no other way associated with the account.)

I wonder if Verizon can't stop the spam because it would involve blacklisting all e-mail from eku.edu, the good along with the bad?

(I don't remember ever seeing any content...just little blue boxes with ?s, so I've got zero idea what they're pushing.)

They might be hiding beacons or worse.

Not exactly, from my understanding, they were targeting Verizon email addresses. Yes, they are embedding the first part of the email address in the body of the email, with a hyperlink, and it appears to be coming from an individual. Until you look at the header you don't know it is from the eku.com. You probably didn't see the images because your computer picked it up as spam and did not load them.

I'll probably end up running the accounts through Google.

There are a myriad of ways someone may have brained your email address. Odds are the actual spammers bought your email address from someone on the Internet and may be several times removed from the person that originally obtained and subsequently sold the mail lists. The original list could have originated from a disgruntled EKU employee, or student struggling to pay off eduction loans. It could have been leaked by someone in an alumnae association. EKU may have legally sold the mailing list to some organization and it leaked out from there. It could have been captured by a bot on an unsuspecting innocent's computer. (Campus PCs are notorious for the number of viruses they have.)

There are ways of stopping that kind of junk from getting to you but too often the cure is worse than the problem and clever spammers are really good at finding ways around even such draconian measures as white lists and/or black lists.

Which poses the question: would changing their domain name be an answer? Then ALL mail from that domain could be blacklisted.

Dunno...they don't respond to clicks (in an isolated clone).

Artie505, are you still getting them?

No; see my post #36865.

The new account and my pre-existing others are and have been spam free.

(Response to earlier posts later)

I got confused because this sounded present tense.

Oops! Sorry! (Should have said "didn't".)

Sure, but consider the flip-side of the coin.

And changing from .com to, say, .net would be equally problematic.

I dunno; I just quoted you.


and


Responding to both of you at once since your posts are related...

This was yet another example of why I'm incapable of being a teacher; my crystal clear is everybody else's muddy.

Here, in real, clear detail, is what I was trying to explain:

(Do you ever post on WQXR.org, slolerner? I ask because I clearly remember having posted there while I was receiving the spam.)

When I post on WQXR, I post as user "xyz" with e-mail address "abc@verizon.net".

In the beginning, the spam e-mails opened with "Hi, abc"...understandable, but after a while, some of it began with "Hi, xyz", "xyz" being something that nobody could have known about without having had access to my WQXR (or other) post (elsewhere), because it's not a part of any e-mail address I've ever used. (User "xyz" is not exclusive to WQXR, but that's the only website I can think of on which I definitely used it around the critical time.)

Edit: I forgot about this, and it may be important: I do NOT log in to WQXR, nor is "xyz" my user name on any website that requires log-in. "xyz" is only transmitted in the body of whichever form I've filled out.

I don't think any of the "Hi, ...s" were hyperlinks, because they were in plain text...neither blue nor underlined. (I never tried clicking on one.)

And finally, the e-mails with those ?s in little blue boxes were not all identified as spam by Mail, and my pref is to load remote images, so, again, I dunno. (There was a thread not long ago that dealt with ?s in little blue boxes that didn't respond to clicks, but I don't remember the issue being resolved.)

Now that this issue has gone far beyond me I think I'll reinstate the account I deleted so I can pay closer attention to what goes on...assuming that the spamming picks up where it left off.

Verizon wouldn't allow me to reinstate "abc", so I went with "abc1".

Let's see if the bad guys pick up on it.

I appreciate the time spent on this, but we are not going to solve it. I can run the account through Google.

You should certainly give it a try, and I certainly hope they can do the job that Verizon has so far been unable to do (although I've got to admit that I'm skeptical), but it's caught my attention, particularly because they got hold of a name to which they shouldn't have had any access, and I'm hooked.

You, of course, are interested in cleaning out your mail box, but although mine has already been cleaned out, eku.edu has become a puzzle, so I'll stick around to see how/if it's finally solved.

(No spam in the new account so far.)

Edit: Again, do you ever post on WQXR.org?

The plot thickens!

I did some searching, and I found that not only is @eku.edu being spoofed, but the bad guys apparently have their entire directory of student @eku.edu e-mail addresses, and therein lies part, possibly even all, of the blocking problem: There are both legitimate and spam e-mails coming from the same addresses.

Whew! Nasty!!!

Q: If they are using Beacons in any way, where would they be stored?

Nary a clue, nor do I know what they are (other than what they sound like they are).

I assume, though, that if a beacon should beckon, LittleSnitch will tip you off, and you should be able to learn its path from the pop-up.

They're stored in your browser's cache. They're mostly used surreptitiously for tracking, but web beacons such as Omniture (Adobe Analytics) have a functionality beyond that (which can foil your access to many sites).
You can check out what's being stored on your machine via about:cache (Firefox; I don't know about Safari) or via the CacheViewer app.
This was a forum topic some time back.

Would Onyx remove them?

Edit: No, I never posted on WQXR. Forgot to answer that question. If they have all the students' addresses at the college, then it seems they could be harvesting addresses from anywhere.

Yes, but so would just clearing your cache. Problem is that you can't remove them selectively (as previous discussion on that topic concluded).

That's ok, thanks.

Does your cat know he/she only has three legs?

Probably hacked in.

Thinking about it, it sounds kinda brilliant!

Having legitimate e-mail and spam coming from so many exact same addresses probably makes blocking awfully difficult.

If you look closely, you can just glimpse the left hindlimb.
The GIF animation is a tad choppy ... but what the hey?!

On a more existential level: I'm pretty sure that 3-legged cats (whether congenitally or surgically so) don't bother themselves with such matters. They make the necessary physical and mental adjustments and carry on.
One of my veterinary colleagues had a 3-legged (only one HL) cat and could move just as fast as a 4-legged one; she could also climb trees with no problem (other than resembling a furry nut hatch).

The ones that impress me are the cats and dogs that have only TWO legs. One front and one back, on opposite sides. They move like a cheetah on a pogo stick

The ones with only two front or two rear legs aren't nearly as athletic

I get your point, but wasting time hacking and spamming seems contradictory to brilliant.
It's vandalism and property damage.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vqp0_vIs7XA

Not if it pays!

Robbing a bank pays. No idea what these guys are up to.


Reputation damage?

Same thing as all spammers, I guess; robbing from whomever they can...and with far less vulnerability.

(Still no spam coming to "abc1"...guess they're not that sophisticated.)

Doesn't anybody other than me think it's exceptionally unusual and extremely disconcerting that a name that has never been part of an e-mail address, never been included in either the subject line or body of an e-mail, never been transmitted over the Internet as a user login name, but has ONLY been used as a user name in an embedded website submission form has turned up in the body of spam e-mails?

I have been thinking about it and can't figure out how that happened. Are you sure you only used it in one place? Was it like a nickname or user name that you used more than once? And it showed up in the eku.edu spam?

Did you ever use that name in an email?

I used the name at perhaps a handful of sites, and I've now realized that I actually did use it as a login name at one (that I haven't visited it in at least 2 years), but other than that it's as I said.

And the name appeared in the body of eku.edu spam e-mails.

Interesting...

I just realized that was what happened to me! The box being spammed is, say, xyx@ but in the text it said, "Hey, abc..." I have another account I set up with abc@ so I didn't notice the switch.

Artie505 is on to something...

Nobody but you and I seems to think so.

I wonder what tacit might have to say.

It certainly appears to transcend run of the mill spam.

I discovered that the email account I closed isn't gone but is hiding in the background, so I took a look-see and found that it's still getting spam mail from eku.edu.

Call Verizon

Just curious if you are still getting spoofs from eku.edu?

Corban.edu and nvidia.com just got hit and it looks like the same people.

eku.edu has slowed down to an infrequent trickle, but I get lots of spam from yahoo.com...almost nothing else; I haven't seen anything from either of your two new sources.

Are the Yahoo ones the same, with your name embedded as a link?

Y'know, I haven't paid all that much attention, but I think they show the expected "abc", with very few showing the off-the-wall "xyz".

If the "abc" is a link I never noticed...I just delete the email out of hand. I report only spam from other than yahoo and eku, there being no point to wasting my time telling my ISP something they already know.

Right.

My curiosity peaked when I saw that the same spams started coming from domains other than eku, and nvidia.com was kind of a shock. I was always thinking "Why is someone doing this?" My opinion is it has very little to do with the spams themselves, it is the volume they are able to flood servers with via spoofing.

For what purpose, then, if not spamming?

Are they asking the ISPs for ransom?

I think it's just a brilliant approach to spamming! Spoofing seems like it has got to make the spam more difficult to block, and the ISPs' demonstrated inability to deal with the onslaught seems to support that speculation.

Exponentionally loading up mail servers with messages that don't get dumped? Maybe the motive isn't profit.

I don't buy into the idea that somebody would go to the trouble of spoofing spam from a spoofed domain just to mess with a few ISPs' heads.

They've built the factory...they may as well profit from what it can produce.

These spoofs are produced by exploiting an SPF weakness. That weakness is allowing them to bypass conventional ways to block and be dumped as spam at the server level: they are still delivered despite attempts to block them.

The email delivery systems of many ISPs are being flooded as they continue to use that exploit on domain after domain. Spoofing off NVIDIA is stunning because of the security they must have in place to prevent it. So, why are they, whoever they are, putting so much effort into doing it? Would a sophisticated scheme like this be intended to flood server after server to the point of failure from overload? You keep thinking monetary gain and i fail to see the possibility of making money off it. Wreaking havoc, but not making money. The spam I just started getting from Yahoo have the email addresses of others in To: field. The mailing list is showing. At first I thought it was a mistake, but it keeps happening. I'm intrigued by all this.

When has spam been about anything other than making money? (I'm sure those links you've spoken of lead somewhere.)

Yes, they are wreaking havoc...probably enjoying it immensely, but it's no more than a possibly even unintended side benefit.

What makes you think it is unintended effect?

Edit: The Yahoo mails that show the mailing list include names at domains like Valentino and citi.com. Pretty impressive mailing list. Not the usual one you buy. Oh, well, who knows?

I said "possibly".

They certainly could be anarchists as well as thieves, but primarily is, I think, unlikely.

Maybe overthinking it.

(I've been waiting all day for one to show up so I could scope it out, but no such luck.)

Did you just say that they're sending spam to Valentino and Citi as well as you and me?

That would add a third aspect to the havoc and lend some credence to the anarchy theory.

I dunno... Maybe it is all for fun, and the money is just a side benefit.

Edit: Naaah!

Speaking of overthinking, I wonder if the fact that you're getting spam from new sources that aren't targeting me, too, suggests that we've got one or more copycats out there who've latched on to a good idea?

From Bloomberg.com. January 2016
(Article addressing small-batch, targeted spam, but interesting stats and proposed solution for phishing and spoofing.)

Full article here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-19/e-mail-spam-goes-artisanal

...As anyone with a Gmail or Yahoo! account knows, spam e-mail is mostly relegated to a folder you probably never check. Unlike the old days of the Internet, in-boxes are no longer clogged with poorly worded come-ons for Viagra pills and Nigerian banking scams. Modern anti-spam filters block more than 99.99 percent of junk messages.

Spam is still a big business. Unsolicited junk mail accounts for 86 percent of the world's e-mail traffic, with about 400 billion spam messages sent a day, according to Talos, a digital threat research division of Cisco Systems. While the vast majority will never see the inside of an inbox, the few that do worked hard to get there...

...the cyber-security industry is pushing for adoption of new protections that could save our in-boxes. One, called DMARC, is a global registry that lets retailers and other companies register the servers they use to send the kind of mass mailers some people enjoy receiving. Messages purporting to be from those companies but coming from an unregistered address would get flagged. It's a compelling idea, but as with most proposed solutions, trying to get everyone on board has been costly and time-consuming.

Moderator: Maybe start a new thread with this post. The bunch above are just Artie505 and I discussing a very specific set of spoofs.

Actually, your last quoted paragraph is directly related to this thread and is well placed here, I think.


That idea ought to be getting a huge boost from the spoofing problem we've been discussing.

Well, it does relate, but I think this string is so deep, and we are off the topic of the original issue, that it may be worth starting a new discussion just about spam in general...

Got one from att.com today; this thing is getting out of hand.

Moderator: Still think this thread has gone off topic and a new one should be started at #38524. This discussion of spoofing and complex spam is getting buried under "iPad has two mail accounts..."

Did you click the Notify button at the bottom of the post? I am not a moderator here so I can't help you.

Duh. I thought the notify button was just to report bad behavior.