Stopping Fraudulent Spam Emails
Also see: Virtual Private Network Software for Maximum Privacy on the Internet
Stopping Fraudulent Spam Emails
There are multiple things we can do to reduce the amount of spam emails that we get in our inbox.
This is just one that I may not have mentioned before, but applied successfully this past week in trying to eliminate a particularly annoying spam source.
Seemingly out of the blue, all of a sudden last I started getting bogus messages that were designed to look like Amazon emails.
All of the emails were listed as coming from "order-update" at "amazon.com", but I could tell by hovering my cursor over the links in the messages that these emails were not from Amazon.
What I discovered was that a domain called alertmessage.com had become listed in my Address Book (some email programs call it Contacts). My spam blocker would have kept the messages out of my inbox otherwise.
Even though the "alertmessage.com" domain did not appear visibly in the spam messages, it seemed to match the problem.
I believe that the domain got into my Address Book by attempting to move one of these messages to a place I could report it as a fraud, but accidentally clicking on the wrong line in a pop-down menu.
In trying to figure this out, I opened up my Address Book and looked through my contacts listings one by one to find any that seemed strange.
When I came to the listing for "alertmessage.com", I deleted it from my Address Book, and that seems to have resolved the problem.
These spams had been coming in for 4-5 days, but since I did the deletion I've seen no more such emails in about 2 days.
In doing a Google search I found reports about this problem, but no mention of what I found. The email address and domain that I mention of course are not the only one's tied to this kind of abuse. These "phishing" and "spoofing" techniques are a widespread form of fraud.
This highlights the usefulness of going through one's Contacts or Address Book now to do a clean-up. Many if not most email services will allow emails to sail right through to your Inbox if the originating domain is in your address or contacts list.
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