Any chance that SpamSieve might be the source of spam?

Before I bought SpamSieve, I would characteristically receive 3 or 4 spam messages per day among my half dozen email accounts. It had been that way for YEARS. Although the amount of spam was minimal, it was still a pain going through my messages each day and verifying which had been identified as spam but weren’t, as well as those that were spam but not identified as such (Apple Mail’s built in filter was often unable to learn; the same spam messages would often still make it through even though I repeatedly marked them as spam).

So I bought SpamSieve and within TWO DAYS (!) I started receiving dozens of spam messages per day into EACH of my accounts. Now, about a month later, I get 300-400 PER DAY! SpamSieve is very good at identifying them as such, but I still have to review them all to make sure there were no mis-identifications.

The sceptic in me finds in very unusual that a flow of spam that was steady at the rate of 3 or 4 per day for 20+ YEARS would suddenly jump to several hundred per day as soon as I installed SpamSieve and when absolutely nothing else whatsoever changed in my computing environment. I find myself wondering if C-Command deliberately captured all my email account information and either sends spam to those addresses or shares that information with third-party spammers just to make me happy that I bought the software (and will thus recommend it to others).

Has anyone else seen a similar pattern? If not, can anyone explain what may have happened to cause such a DRAMATIC increase in spam volume (and how to stop it)?

From what I’ve seen personally, as well as heard from others, there seems to have been a big increase in the number of spams sent over the last few months. It is also possible that there was a change in the filtering that your mail provider is using, so that a higher percentage of the spams sent to you are getting through to your account.

Of course, C-Command does not do anything to increase your spam. We wouldn’t want to, and besides that it would be bad business—because word would get out. On a more practical level, we couldn’t do what you’re suggesting because we don’t have access to your account information. If you install a network monitoring utility such as Little Snitch or Wireshark, you can see that SpamSieve does not send out any of your information—and in fact functions normally if denied network access entirely.

Thanks, Michael. It seemed very illogical to me that C-Command would be the cause, since, as you point out, it would be a pretty shabby business plan. But the coincidence was hard to ignore. An additional piece of coincidence that I didn’t mention in my original post: I have email accounts in 4 domains. All but one account in one of those domains are defined in Mail on my Mac and all are receiving the very high volume of spam. All those accounts are also defined on my wife’s Mac. But there is one additional email account on hers that is not set up on mine. Her Mac doesn’t have SpanSieve installed, and that one account does not have the problem. Big mystery.

I’ll contact my ISP - InMotion Hosting - with an inquiry on the matter.