Spammers are hand-writing emails rather than using bots

Spammers are using a new technique to get through Junk mail filtering.  Historically, spammers have used masses of emails from automated servers and virus infected PCs to send out spam.  Nowadays, they are using dedicated teams of people with genuine email accounts (often gmail or outlook.com accounts) and will target you specifically to sell what they have to sell - in our experience, mailing lists of potential clients, but they will try to sell you whatever they think you might pay for.  They then email you again, attatching a copy of the original email, suggesting a meeting or call, with the implication that it was already arranged with you, and (we guess) hope that you feel minded to look at the details to find out what you have missed.

 

Unfortunately there's not much you can do about this, other than be really vigilant.  They are genuinely using an approved email service, so it's usually Google's or Microsoft's problem, but we all can take comfort in the fact that we have forced them to be much more labour-intensive in the battle between unsolicited emailers and us, their potential targets. 

 

Our best advice is that you never communicate with an unsolicited emailer unless you know that they are genuinely looking to buy from you, and even then be careful, as they may get you to send them goods or supply services and not pay.  Treat anything that arrives in an unsolicited email with a greater level of suspicion that you might have for a random person appearing at your door with no ID trying to sell you a holiday in a place you've never heard of.