One of the reasons why I unsubbed one month into a sub (I haven’t played in a few years) is due to constant in-game spam - multiple chars of mine get in-game spam about buying gold.
Sometimes the name is different, but several times it visually looks the same. Regardless of the name, the message is always the same - inviting me to buy gold or power leveling service. I never used any of these services, never bought gold, never visited the site. I don’t know how they know my char names (sometimes my char that I haven’t played in days gets a fresh mail) but it gets to the point where I report the same mail 5-10 times a day.
It’s so annoying, I don’t want to play the game anymore so I cancelled my subscription. Looks like Blizzard doesn’t bother blocking mail based on keywords or they are on it in the first place, who knows.
Do you report them as spam, Dariya? We do what we can to limit their ability to reach folks, but the only time stuff like that is likely to stop entirely is if the method of communication is eliminate, like removing Chat or the Mail system (which isn’t really a feasible solution) or if the market for it is no longer there.
Now some details on reporting it. As Kozzae mentioned when you report the mail as spam, it temporarily ignores it. This makes the mail disappear, but the ignore is temporary so when you log back in that mail will be visible to you again. If you’ve already reported it, it is safe to delete.
Yes, I report it every single time.
Today, I logged into my char I haven’t played for a while, and lo and behold, 2 ingame mails with the same message from 2 different people.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just one or two bad actors, these tend to be organized “companies” with troops of people.
As they change tactics our hacks team works to adjust to help address them, but those reports absolutely help to limit their reach. For example, the two you mentioned have already been addressed.
I wish there were an option to block all incoming player mail from any character that isn’t (a) on your account, (b) in your guild, or (c) on your friends list.
Similar to the option to block all guild invites. You can always briefly disable it on the off chance you need to get mail from a random person, then just re-enable it. I personally never need to receive mail, so it would be very helpful to avoid getting inundated with spam advertising mails, which has been happening a ton lately. Very frustrating.
When you report a mail, it technically ignores that user. It does not usually delete the mail.
When you are online it will not show up again.
When you log off and back in later, it will show up again.
To you it may appear to be a different mail, but most likely it’s the same one just showing up again.
Go ahead and delete that mail. It should not show up again."
I do not believe that is the case, the mail disappears from my inbox and I never manually delete it. If it did what you say it did, then I would have multiple mails already, I’ve reported a dozen or so so far.
When you report an in-game mail, the system also hides it, removing it from your view. It does not delete it, it’s just hidden for the rest of your play session. The next time you log in with that character, the mail will be visible again. At this point, since it has already been reported, it’s safe to delete.
Ah, this isn’t hard to fix in some cases.
If a mail contains, oh say, something like mmorpgxxxx dot com bounce it back to the sender saying, “stop advertising your gold selling web site”. Lots of other keywords that mail could auto-block.
I’m getting TONS of spam for this website, they’re not obfuscating it.
If they did, then block mmorpgxxxx by itself - and any other known gold selling sites.
I can’t think of any legit mail that would contain this.
Right, but my point is they’ll just change letters around and then we’ll be right back where we started and that effort spent and resources used for the first block would essentially have been wasted.
Yes, playing leapfrog with a unicorn.
But if they change the letters around too much, then the stupid people who go to these gold selling websites won’t have the IQ to figure it out.
A filter does not work. They tried one for in-game chat. Five (5) minutes after the servers came up after the change and they were back to advertising.
Disparaging other players doesn’t help. It’s not a matter of IQ. IQ hasn’t protected anyone from believing conspiracies. It won’t protect them from buying gold from criminals. If changing the letters around was all it took to stop players from buying from them, any of the other filters that had been tried would have worked years ago.
