Digital Security
Has your inbox recently been deluged with unwanted and even outright malicious messages? Here are 10 possible reasons – and how to stem the tide.
27 Jan 2026 • , 5 min. read
For all our modern obsession with social media and messaging apps, email remains a daily staple for many of us. Modern email providers are pretty good at filtering out unsolicited messages known as spam, their checks don’t necessarily work all the time. Much like with unwanted phone calls, sometimes it can feel like the internet gods have opened the floodgates as your inbox suddenly fills up with unwanted and malicious messages.
When it happens, the deluge can come without warning. But why? And what you can do about it?
Email spam can range from pesky, unsolicited missives sent in bulk to the downright dangerous and malicious (phishing messages and malware delivered via spam and also known as ‘malspam’). Here’s how you might end up with a sudden influx:
The cybercrime economy is a vast and complex entity in which individual participants usually perform a specialized role in the pursuit of wealth. Some might focus on breaching organizations in order to steal large volumes of customer data, including email addresses and personally identifiable information (PII). They then post or sell that data on cybercrime forums/marketplaces, where others buy it for use in phishing emails. They may impersonate the company that’s just been breached, citing your PII and account info to encourage you to believe their story. The end goal is usually to steal your logins or financial information, or trick you into installing malware.
A surge in spam probably means a batch of email addresses including your own has just been released on the cybercrime underground. Alternatively, a company may have accidentally leaked the information into the public domain, allowing nefarious actors to profit from.
Today’s fraudsters have much of the heavy lifting already done for them, thanks to pre-packaged scam/phishing kits that handle everything from brand spoofing to obfuscation, phishing lures and possibly even multi-factor authentication bypass. Innovation is fast paced, with developers of these kits looking to add new features all the time to outwit security vendors and email providers. If they manage to achieve a breakthrough that bypasses spam filters, expect unwanted messages to start flooding in.
Sometimes scammers focus their efforts on particular groups, such as employees of a specific company or users of a particular service (e.g., Netflix). That may be because they’ve got the data from a breach at one of these companies, or because they’ve scraped the data from specific sites.
Phishing campaigns often use current events to improve success rates. Things like celebrity deaths and major emergencies and health crises, such as COVID-19, are typical fare. But seasonal spikes in spam can also come just before Christmas, or when consumers are filing their taxes, for example.
AI tools enable fraudsters to scale phishing campaigns with highly convincing messages designed to bypass spam filters. AI can also help with reconnaissance, to find your email address from publicly available sources which may otherwise be hard to unearth.
Spammers don’t just source their email lists from large-scale data breaches. Some of them get hold of these details by using bots to scrape public-facing websites like social media platforms. Bad bot traffic accounts for 37% of all internet traffic. If your details were in the public domain, they may have been caught up in such a campaign.
Spammers work like regular marketers. They might often end up with large email lists which they then have to whittle down to improve the ROI of campaigns. So if you click on a spam message or, even worse, reply, the sender will know that it is “live”, potentially leading to a new influx of messages.
If your inbox is suddenly brimming with unwanted messages, it may be a distraction tactic designed to bury an important message – say, a security alert from your bank or a notification of a purchase you didn’t make. The scammer will sign you up to potentially hundreds of newsletters or websites to inundate your inbox and hide that one crucial message.
During birthdays or before festive periods, you might go on a shopping spree. Some merchants may try and capitalize on this busy period by hiding marketing signups. Forget to uncheck/check them and you may get a deluge of annoying spam from the brands you bought from.
Say, your email security tool works by using AI to learn what suspicious activity looks like and you start fiddling with your settings and reset these, and it may wipe all that learned behavior.
Here’s how to hit back at the spammers and keep potentially dangerous scams out of your inbox:
It’s also best practice never to:
As with much of cybersecurity, the email threat landscape is a never-ending arms race between attackers and defenders. Arm yourself with these best practices, and effective third-party security tools, and you stand the best chance of keeping your inbox free from sudden surges in spam.
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