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No, there have been surprisingly few porn sites in the mix, as far as I can tell. Maybe more among the ones in foreign languages, but I wouldn't likely recognize them unless they're in Italian, Spanish, etc. But the mention makes me think of a friend who was presenting a power point to a group of executives a few years back. His email would pop up a message on the screen occasionally, but suddenly there were several Viagra and Cialis ads in a row. After 5 or 6 had popped up, he just turned to the group and said "I wonder how they know?".

Damn, guess I'm doing something wrong. I only get the voice messages from the Chinese Embassy wanting me to pay them to make sure I'm not deported back to my homeland.

I have cox as my carrier. When I was getting a lot of spam, I contacted them and told them to step up their game. They did. Your internet provider might be able to help you.

Some years back when I was the "producer" of our church newsletter (typed in all the articles the editor gave me to make a pretty booklet out of it each month, because she didn't use a computer) I went to a Christian clip-art site to get some free clip-art for our booklets. I got the clip-art and hundreds of emails. This was back when we in the country had dial-up, so anything was slow to do. It took a LONG time for my mail to load each day with all the extra spam. Hundreds and hundreds a day for days. Mostly porn sites of one type or another. Our computer was in the living room for our children to use for their homework. I never opened, never clicked links, just kept deleting for days and days. It slowed down quickly and eventually stopped. Porn sites?!

I think I may have found the answer to what's going on. If you don't mind clicking on a link, here's the article I just now read: https://www.howtogeek.com/412316/how-email-bombing-uses-spam-to-hide-an-attack/ If you don't want to click on the link, I'll try to summarize what "email bombing" is all about. The attacker has likely gained access to one of my online accounts (especially one with stored payment info), and they want to try and order from that account. They're hoping that if I get a notification about a transaction I'll miss it, or even delete it along with a group of known booming emails, and the transaction will go through. They might make the effort at the outset in hopes that I'm overwhelmed, or they might try it after a little time has passed, in hopes that they will have exhausted me and I've given up. The article also suggests a few ways to mount a defense, but it's clear that this type of attack is difficult to deal with.

Your address can be randomly spammed, it can be grabbed from someone's address book, and so on. (AOL was notorious for having their address books compromised.) For business use, there really is no perfect filtering, other than manually setting up filters, and reviewing your spam folder. If you need the easiest solution, gmail likely has the best filters (you can wash your mail through them via forwarding if you do not normally use their system). I used to use mailwasher, and it is a decent product. Caveat, gmail, and other online filters, do read your messages, and use the content to make money (serve ads).

Be alert, your contact information may have been sold some where in the hacker universe. You may end up having the same issues on your cell phone. You should probably check your credit information and be actively monitoring your financial accounts for awhile.

In follow-up, this morning I deleted 1,400 messages that had accumulated in my Spam Inbox overnight.