This one has me flummoxed! I have been analysing my spam lately to see if there is anything I can do to reduce the quantities. Now please bear in mind I have many email addresses across multiple domains – I won’t go into why, but I do.

Anyway, virtually all of my email addresses redirect to my GMail account and I was using GMail’s great search functionality to analyse the spam. I was more than a little surprised to discover 42 spam emails that met the criteria of “sent to a gmail address but not mine”! That’s since December 16th when I cleared my spam folder.

I reported one of the emails to Google via their abuse report but have not heard anything back. I suppose it has only been a couple of weeks and they must get a lot.

I’ve just been taking another look at it and it seems that I’m getting stuff that is addressed to any GMail address with the same first three letters (although one shares only the first letter).

Anybody else with a GMail account getting this kind of spam? It’s easy to search for. Just click on the ‘show search options’ link next to the search buttons and then select Spam to search in and in the To: field type

@gmail.com -myaddress

…where ‘myaddress’ is the first part of your GMail address.

Let me know at arj at zkarj dot co dot nz.