A Ton of Spam / Junk Mail - How to Make it Stop?!

Question

I'd say over the last two months I'm receiving about 3-4 dozen "spam" messages. When it started I had not done anything particularly "different" on my iMac that would have triggered this. I noticed all the spams are sent from various "mac.com" accounts and have a similar "look" (as if they created by the same designer but always different messages) if that is any help. For a while I "bounced" the messages (in the past this seems to have ceased such spam) but no dice. Last weekend I upgraded from 10.6.8 to Mavericks and again, absolutely no difference. In fact, I do not even see a "bounce" option in the Mavericks mail program anymore. My email has always identified these as spam but they are still floating around in my inbox "marked" as spam while some go into the Spam -- either isn't the issue; my issue is stopping the mail in the first place! 

Answer 1

Chris Holub1 wrote:
I don't understand why all this spam is happening in the first place. I don't have a very active online presence...
When spam goes way up or way down a lot of times it is not directly about anything you personally did. Unfortunately that also means that you usually can't initiate any specific action that will stop it. Some examples for instance. One recent spam flood I determined to be related to a specific email address that I had given to one company, and that company's email database got hacked, so all of those addresses fell into the hands of spammers. In another case, I could tell that I got certain spam because a friend's computer got hacked and so her email address book was acquired by spammers. In both cases it was nothing I did. In both cases it was not about my "online presence." In both cases my email was in the possession of a trusted business and a trusted friend, not published in public, and it was what happened to them, not to me, that caused my email address to be leaked out into the wrong hands. There is nothing I could have done to prevent it, except to not use email to communicate with those trusted parties (not a realistic option in most cases). The only thing that helps is to use an email provider with a trainable spam filter that is known to work well.
The good news is that the spam level can often goes down on its own, although it can come back up later due to another random event.