I think I've been hit with malware.

chscag

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I received a good one on my iPhone last night. The text said that my Chase Account had been closed because I violated their terms of agreement. Of course there was a link included that I was to click on to check on my account.

That's the first time I received one of those on my phone. The deceivers are trying anything to get to us. And what really ticks me off about that is Apple has yet to provide a way to block text spam on your phone or iPad.
 
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what really ticks me off about that is Apple has yet to provide a way to block text spam on your phone or iPad.

I'm sure I read just such a method just a day or so ago that I think was on OS X Daily.com If I recall correctly, if not probably Macworld.com.'s



- Patrick
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Patrick, if this is what you read, it can block an address, but not really spam.
 

chscag

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I'm sure I read just such a method just a day or so ago that I think was on OS X Daily.com If I recall correctly, if not probably Macworld.com.'s



- Patrick
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There is a work around that was posted by either OS X Daily.com or someone else, I forget. The work around is to create a contact called "Spam". Each time you receive a spam text, you can assign that number to the contact "Spam". The catch here is that "Spam" has to be listed in your blocked contacts. It's a PITA work around because you have to assign each number every time to "Spam". It's easier to just delete the miserable text.
 
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And what really ticks me off about that is Apple has yet to provide a way to block text spam on your phone or iPad.
Charlie, what I do is that I subscribe to a mail forwarding service with a great spam filter--pobox.com. Then I set up all my email accounts (I have three) to forward all mail to the address at pobox, which then does the spam filtering and puts it in my address there. I used to just use the forwarding service, but I've decided to just use the mailbox at pobox.com as my mail provider so that if I travel, I can get to it cleanly and if I decide to dump my ISP, I don't have to make any email changes. Yes, I could use Gmail, or Hotmail, or whatever, but then the spam gets ugly again.
 

chscag

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My problem is not with email spam, it's with text message spam. It seems the spammers have found that it's easier to send spam text messages to someone's phone rather than to their email address. That's what I was referring to above when I replied to Patrick.
 
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My problem is not with email spam, it's with text message spam. It seems the spammers have found that it's easier to send spam text messages to someone's phone rather than to their email address. That's what I was referring to above when I replied to Patrick.
Ah, OK. I don't get spam text (so far). But then I don't spread around my cell number much, either. And my Apple email is very rarely used, if ever.
 

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Apple is supposedly going to tighten this up a bit with the release of iOS 14. At least I hope so.

There is also another way to block spam text messages but it's not free. Several carriers offer a pay service where they will block texts that are not from your contacts. I know T-Mobile offers the service and perhaps Verizon (I think).
 
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The real keys to memory are two: the pressure and swap. Pressure is shown on the graphic in Activity Monitor, and as long as it is green, the system is not having to work hard to manage memory. Swap should be, as best you can, nearly zero. Swap is the stuff that the OS had to move OUT of memory onto the drive to make room. More swap is higher overhead and slower performance. So, even with 8GB, as long as pressure is green and swap is low, you are in good condition.
Hello, I hope it is better to reply to a rather outdated post instead of starting a new thread ?? @MacInWin, after reading this thread, I checked the pressure (never heard of that before :)) and the swap count on my 2019 21.5" iMac (8 GB + 1 TB Fusion Drive). The pressure was green, but the swap count was 1.49 GB, nowhere close to zero ! And the Activity Monitor showed something like 6.5 GB of the 8 GB of RAM was in use.
As it was pointed out in this thread, Apple is still selling machines (like mine) with 8GB RAM that are not meant to be upgraded/expanded; I assume this is to keep the purchase price down, which of course worked for me since I accepted that restriction when I bought it.
HOWEVER, I decided to try unloading the programs that were hogging the memory acc to Activity Monitor. Notably, I uninstalled everything Adobe (after reading about how its programs tend to screw things up) since I don't use anything except Acrobat Reader these days. I quit all the processes I don't need, like some recently installed Western Digital software. Then I rebooted the computer.
Now, Activity Monitor shows zero swaps (!) but the memory use is still 5.71 GB.
I feel like that doesn't give much margin to 8 GB, but apparently that doesn't matter because of the swap potential ?
I don't THINK I have a lot of big apps running, the largest memory use is Safari Web Content (Cached).
I have not often deleted cached files - should I do that ? what are the consequences ?

I guess for the next computer I will break down and pay for more RAM, unless there is a better solution.

Thanks,

Ann
 
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Ann, that amount of free memory, 2.29 (8 - 5.71) is actually very good. The macOS is very good at memory utilization, so what is key is the "pressure" and not the absolute memory used. You didn't say what Adobe products you uninstalled, nor what you had running when the swapping occurred, but I would bet that if you were editing images, or video that is where the swap happened. And once swap gets used, I don't think it gets returned until the system is rebooted. It may not be used, but it is allocated. So, if 1.49GB was the max ever used for swap, it could have been there because you edited a photoshop file, let's say something middling size, 50MB. Photoshop keeps versions, up to 12, so you can "undo" your edits if you don't like them, so if you did that dozen or more edits, you now have 600MB of stuff to keep, which PS tries to keep in memory, but will eventually run out of space and swapping will kick in. Do that 3-4 times, or have 3-4 of these middling files open at the same time and there you have the 1.49GB of swap. It's easy to do with big files and deep history stacks. For the "average" user 8GB is just fine, but if you routinely edit PS files, or videos (rendering takes a TON of memory), then your next machine you may want to get more RAM. All that said, these days with SSDs instead of rotating drives, the penalty for swap is much less, as the saving and retrieval of the swapped out data is much faster. Right now my swap happens to be zero, but if I launch Parallels and fire up Win10, as I do occasionally, that will change.

So, bottom line, with an SSD swapping is not that super critical, but memory pressure is.

One final thought: It's ok to use all of the memory. That means you are getting the maximum performance out of your Mac. If you have free memory, you could be doing more than you are. So don't sweat the numbers, look at the pressure.
 
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Ann, that amount of free memory, 2.29 (8 - 5.71) is actually very good. The macOS is very good at memory utilization, so what is key is the "pressure" and not the absolute memory used. You didn't say what Adobe products you uninstalled, nor what you had running when the swapping occurred, but I would bet that if you were editing images, or video that is where the swap happened. And once swap gets used, I don't think it gets returned until the system is rebooted. It may not be used, but it is allocated. So, if 1.49GB was the max ever used for swap, it could have been there because you edited a photoshop file, let's say something middling size, 50MB. Photoshop keeps versions, up to 12, so you can "undo" your edits if you don't like them, so if you did that dozen or more edits, you now have 600MB of stuff to keep, which PS tries to keep in memory, but will eventually run out of space and swapping will kick in. Do that 3-4 times, or have 3-4 of these middling files open at the same time and there you have the 1.49GB of swap. It's easy to do with big files and deep history stacks. For the "average" user 8GB is just fine, but if you routinely edit PS files, or videos (rendering takes a TON of memory), then your next machine you may want to get more RAM. All that said, these days with SSDs instead of rotating drives, the penalty for swap is much less, as the saving and retrieval of the swapped out data is much faster. Right now my swap happens to be zero, but if I launch Parallels and fire up Win10, as I do occasionally, that will change.

So, bottom line, with an SSD swapping is not that super critical, but memory pressure is.

One final thought: It's ok to use all of the memory. That means you are getting the maximum performance out of your Mac. If you have free memory, you could be doing more than you are. So don't sweat the numbers, look at the pressure.

Well, I learned something very useful today ! Thank you Jake :) .
I had been running a trial version of PhotoShop and indeed had been trying to edit a couple of files, unsuccessfully in the end, but now I see that PS didn't "know" I had given up (even though the trial ended without me subscribing) so it kept them in memory. Creative Cloud also proved to be using a lot of memory, although I wasn't using Creative Cloud, to my knowledge.
If 8 GB is OK for the "average" user, it's enough for me. I edit videos from time to time (also fairly unsuccessfully...) but will watch out for memory pressure.
That said, I am still getting frequent beachballs and though they go away, they are annoying as everyone knows. Randy, I believe, suggested I swap out the Fusion drive for a large SSD, but I'm not sure how much that would cost including installation (not sure I'm up to doing that myself with this machine). I assumed the Fusion drive would be a help, but in the event it doesn't seem that much faster than the spinning HD I had in my previous iMac.

And about deleting cached files ? How about emptying Trash ? Would that have any impact on computer speed ?

Cheers

Ann
 
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A fusion drive is a hybrid of a small SSD and a larger rotational drive. The idea was to have some of the speed of an SSD without the expense of a large one, backed up by a larger HD that would be cheaper. Replacing your fusion drive with a pure SSD will definitely improve the snappiness of your system because now nothing has to suffer the relatively slow read/write of the rotational drive.

Beachballs can be caused by lots of things, depending on the circumstances. Randy Singer has a webpage all about that: http://www.macattorney.com/rbb.html
 
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I hope you're not implying that these emails are fake. I'm just waiting for 20 million dollars to come through from Liberia. How long do you think it'll take? :sneaky:
 
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Patrick, if this is what you read, it can block an address, but not really spam.


Here's another similar one that just arrived a day or so ago:
How to Block & Unblock Senders on Gmail (via Gmail.com)

I'm not sure that it will work for what the user wants.


- Patrick
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