Received 199 junk emails per day - why?

Signing up for mailing lists, posting email addresses, using the “unsubscribe” links widely found in spam, reading spam with the remote image loading enabled or explicitly loading remote images, there are lots of ways to get spam, and to get more and more spam.

Here are some of the common scams:

… Recognize and avoid phishing messages, phony support calls, and other scams - Apple Support

How Apple suggests managing and reporting junk:

… Manage junk mail in Mail on iCloud.com - Apple Support

… Report and reduce spam in iCloud Mail - Apple Support

Within mail, mark junk as junk, using the following circled icon (bucket with an X, maybe?):

The above image is from mail on an iPad on iPadOS 17, but mail on an iPhone on iOS 17 uses the same icon for junk.

The problem is iOS. the MacOS does a good job of dumping junk into a junk folder--I think it learned from my categorization, either on my ISP (RCN) of on the MacBook. iOS17 on iPad or iPhone 14 does not learn from my labor in labelling junk as junk. There is no option in the Mail app to filter using the labor I've put into it.

The iPhone being safe has nothing to do with receiving spam emails. Data like your email address and phone number exist in databases (every time you provide those details as well as many others they are put into a database)….some companies sell their database info to data mining companies. Some info is obtained through data breaches that occur. Lots of ways. Your iPhone is not the culprit

Spam is a fact of life in the modern world. Unfortunately, your email address managed to get on a list. That’s virtually impossible to stop…

See what kind of junk mail filtering your email provider offers.

my iCloud mail inbox and VIP box are simultaneously filling up with enumerous junk mail; this occurred suddenly and drastically. I am going to change my iCloud email address. I am alarmed and concerned about this tsunami and invasion of my personal email inbox.

margbeargie wrote:

my iCloud mail inbox and VIP box are simultaneously filling up with enumerous junk mail; this occurred suddenly and drastically. I am going to change my iCloud email address. I am alarmed and concerned about this tsunami and invasion of my personal email inbox.

If your VIP mailbox is filling with spam, there is something decidedly odd about what users you have selected as VIP, or with what spam you are getting.

As for your email address getting collected, whatever here got breached will probably get breached again, or something else with your new email address will get breached. Spam exists, and email addresses are valuable to spammers, and the folks that engage with the spammers—as described above—are particularly valuable.

Changing addresses will undoubtedly provide a moment of respite, and then the spammers will continue to sell both your old (removed) address and capture and sell your newly-created address, and the cycle starts anew.

Apple does offer throw-away email addresses, and some other means to reduce this.

But pragmatically, everybody gets spam.

I’d mark as junk, and move on.