This topic

Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

andydenyer — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 16:51:16 GMT

Over the past few days, I have noticed an increasing number of quite obvious spam and scam emails getting though to my inbox.

As I say, these have all the clear hallmarks of spam and scam emails, so I am wondering why these are getting through BT's spam filters, or are they not operating correctly again? I recall a similar incident earlier this year.

Scam emails relating to non-existent McAfee subscriptions

andydenyer — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 13:55:14 GMT

I seem to be receiving these on a daily basis now, always from gmail email addresses. I don't want to block the gmail domain as I do have a few genuine contacts with gmail addresses.

What I don't understand is why these are getting through to my inbox, despite me reporting them as spam every time.

Which? magazine has highlighted this latest trend, so why is it taking so long for BT Mail to catch up with it and stop these emails from getting through?

https://conversation.which.co.uk/scams/mcafee-norton-antivirus-fake-phishing-email-warning/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=engagingnetworks&utm_campaign=scamalert161021&utm_content=Scam+alert+newsletter+161021

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

PaddyB — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 19:12:52 GMT

Hi @andydenyer,

Thank you for posting. I'm sorry if you've noticed and increase in Spam and scam emails. The scammer and spammers are always looking for ways to get around the Filters.

If you take a look at How to deal with spam in BT Email you'll find a few suggestion that could help.

Thanks,

Paddy

Re: Scam emails relating to non-existent McAfee subscriptions

PaddyB — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 19:59:11 GMT

Hi @andydenyer,

Thank you for posting. We have noticed a increase in the amount of scam emails been sent. Unfortunately the scammers are also always developing new ways of getting around the filter and making their email look legitimate.

There is some really good advice in the Which link you posted, around keeping safe online. You can find some useful information from BT here -Protecting you from scams

Thanks,

Paddy

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

andydenyer — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:17:53 GMT

I understand that. But, as I stated in my original post, these are obvious spam and scam emails with all the usual tell-tale signs such as sender's (alleged) email address (many are xxx@gmail.com where xxx is a complete random string of around 10-12 characters), subject titles ("URGENT - Your McAffee [sic] subscription is about to expire"), mis-spellings and grammatical errors etc., including those that Which? magazine have alerted members to:

https://conversation.which.co.uk/scams/mcafee-norton-antivirus-fake-phishing-email-warning/

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Andy_N — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:30:42 GMT

@andydenyerwrote:
I understand that. But, as I stated in my original post, these are obvious spam and scam emails with all the usual tell-tale signs such as sender's (alleged) email address (many are xxx@gmail.com where xxx is a complete random string of around 10-12 characters), subject titles ("URGENT - Your McAffee [sic] subscription is about to expire"), mis-spellings and grammatical errors etc., including those that Which? magazine have alerted members to:
https://conversation.which.co.uk/scams/mcafee-norton-antivirus-fake-phishing-email-warning/

What's easy for a human to see as obvious spam is far more difficult for a machine, especially when it needs to check billions of emails and not cause vast amounts of false positives.

People do make up weird email addresses, not least to help themselves get spammed! Mispelt words doesn't always mean it's spam - not everyone spells perfectly.

As has been said, spammers try all sorts of tricks to bypass anti-spam systems, but there are vast amounts that are stopped - and these systems will occassionaly fail, either because they have fallen behind in catching the new spam methods, or sometimes because the anti-spam engines might underperform due to the amount hitting it.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

LadyLouisa — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 13:25:56 GMT

Me too! Also for Norton and more random things, thinking of ditching my long held email address it has gotten too bad lately.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

essjay — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 13:18:59 GMT

I too have been subjected to an ever increasing, and most definitely unwanted, level of spam emails recently, and as has been highlighted a lot of them are now coming from spammers with Gmail addresses which make it extremely difficult to deal with effectively as I have friends and colleagues that have Gmail addresses which precludes me from blocking the domain.

It seems the only way is to block the sender, but there are so many different user names I’m blocking around a dozen a day. This is really getting annoying now!!.

Surely BT’s tech dept have the ‘brains’ to combat this ongoing threat, or are they just not employing the right people?

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Andy_N — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 13:31:05 GMT

@essjaywrote:
I too have been subjected to an ever increasing, and most definitely unwanted, level of spam emails recently, and as has been highlighted a lot of them are now coming from spammers with Gmail addresses which make it extremely difficult to deal with effectively as I have friends and colleagues that have Gmail addresses which precludes me from blocking the domain.
It seems the only way is to block the sender, but there are so many different user names I’m blocking around a dozen a day. This is really getting annoying now!!.
Surely BT’s tech dept have the ‘brains’ to combat this ongoing threat, or are they just not employing the right people?

It doesn't work like that. The spam is not coming from gmail accounts, the spammers have spoofed the email addresses to pretend to come from those accounts.

They spoof different addresses each time, so blocking can effectively be pointless.

The spammers are always a step or two ahead of ISP anti-spam systems, so until these engines catch up - there can be a bow wave of spam before they get blocked when the systems learn the spam signatures.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

andydenyer — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 17:35:57 GMT

Today I received an email in my inbox (NOT identified by BT as spam) allegedly from PayPal but was not from a PayPal email address - surely that should be a clear indicator?

Although, rather oddly, when I forwarded it to PayPal, they came back to me to advise that it didn't appear to be fraudulent, even though it contained a link for me to enter my account details, but when I hovered over it, I could see that it would have directed me to a website that also was nothing to do with PayPal!

When I contacted PayPal again about it (this time to a different department), they were able to confirm that they had not sent me any emails in the last 24 hours. I expressed it was rather concerning that their security department could not see anything fraudulent about an email that came from a strange looking email address and contained a somewhat dodgy link for me to enter my account details (which I didn't, of course)!

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Andy_N — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 19:53:33 GMT

@andydenyerwrote:
Today I received an email in my inbox (NOT identified by BT as spam) allegedly from PayPal but was not from a PayPal email address - surely that should be a clear indicator?

Again, it doesn't work like that. Companies use many email addresses, including strange ones. With the millions of businesses out there, for a system to check against some form of dynamic database is not going to be possible. Not only that, spammers do use "real" company addresses - so these would get through based on the criteria you've indicated.

It's easy for "us" to see that the email is not paypal, but maybe pretending to be paypal - but for a machine it's not so simple.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

landie57 — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 07:01:53 GMT

I have noticed a similar increase in spam, some supposedly from my own email account! It's a pain but I simply mark them as spam and block the senders. It certainly seems as if something has changed recently to cause this.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

andydenyer — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 08:47:55 GMT

When I look at the message details of all the spam/scam emails received recently, I can see that they ALL have this in common:

X-Original-Sender: medmohammed7**@gmail.com

I do not see this characteristic in ANY the genuine emails received - ONLY the multitude of spam/scam emails I am receiving each day claiming to be from Norton or McAfee.

On that basis, could this not be identified and used by the spam filters in order to block these?

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Andy_N — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 16:28:37 GMT

@andydenyerwrote:
When I look at the message details of all the spam/scam emails received recently, I can see that they ALL have this in common:
X-Original-Sender: medmohammed7**@gmail.com
I do not see this characteristic in ANY the genuine emails received - ONLY the multitude of spam/scam emails I am receiving each day claiming to be from Norton or McAfee.
On that basis, could this not be identified and used by the spam filters in order to block these?

The thing is, if the address is spoofed - then it's real person's email address. You may not know them of course, but others might. ISP blocking of addresses is rarely done, so the best thing to do is set up your own filters.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Thersites — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 15:06:23 GMT

Technically you are right, @Andy_N the spammers ARE always one or two steps ahead. But the example of the one that is bothering the OP - and which I have also received - is now not one or two steps behind us, but tens of thousands, I'm sure. I have reported it as spam SCORES of times.

And if the pattern-matching neural network software that is behind the spam filters is not up to recognising the pattern of:

1) <16-33 random alphabetic lower case chars>@gmail.com

2) subject or body includes Macafee with a mis-spelling 'Macaffee'

3) body includes an unvarying gif

.....then it's not much use and is not fit for purpose, is it?

I agree with you that we can't expect TOO much of spam filters. But I disagree with your implicit suggestion that the one btinternet users have standing between them and the outside world is, as George Carlin would have said "..just ****ing dandy!".

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Andy_N — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 15:19:06 GMT

@Thersiteswrote:
Technically you are right, @Andy_N the spammers ARE always one or two steps ahead. But the example of the one that is bothering the OP - and which I have also received - is now not one or two steps behind us, but tens of thousands, I'm sure. I have reported it as spam SCORES of times.
And if the pattern-matching neural network software that is behind the spam filters is not up to recognising the pattern of:
1) <16-33 random alphabetic lower case chars>@gmail.com
2) subject or body includes Macafee with a mis-spelling 'Macaffee'
3) body includes an unvarying gif
.....then it's not much use and is not fit for purpose, is it?
I agree with you that we can't expect TOO much of spam filters. But I disagree with your implicit suggestion that the one btinternet users have standing between them and the outside world is, as George Carlin would have said "..just ****ing dandy!".

I have not implied anything, and don't even undertand your last sentence.

The three items you have specified are clearly not going to be rules for ISP based anti-spam engines on their own, for the reasons I have already given.

Many people now use random characters in their email addresses in the hope to prevent dictionary attacks on email addresses.

Indeed you include 2 versions of the correct McAfee spelling. Sometimes even business communications do get spelling wrong.

Attached gifs, not matter what, are themselves not necessarily going to be spammy in nature.

What would happen if you sent a friend an email quoting all of the items you mentioned asking "Have you seen this", or "Be careful of this"? Your email would fail to get through, when your email is clearly not spam. OK it's pretty much a rare thing for some people to do - but the corporate anti-spam systems need to be able to distinguish these against the real spam. Sometimes they will fail.

Again - it's easy for us humans to see that this is obvious spam, but not for machines.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Thersites — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 15:27:25 GMT

NB @andydenyer I intended to say just now that I have successfully fended off this particular spammer with a rule using the mis-spelling of Macaffee, but the rule-compiling software is so buggy and oafish I am loth to recommend it to you.

It's a pretty damning indictment of BT's webmail software that, in attempting to fix, to work-around or to report a one failing, functional omission or bug in it, I have invariably tripped over or been frustrated by one or more others.

SO MANY are the problems that it's downright dishonest of BT to pretend this is a mature product, when in reality we 'users' are in fact alpha-testing for BT while we pay handsomely for it, and are moreover obliged to stumble blindly without the support structures that software in development should have.

So you might try using rules if you have lots of patience, but expect to find some unexpected behaviours as you save and edit them that will make it difficult to know if they are working as you intended. Good luck!

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Thersites — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 15:53:26 GMT

The implication @Andy_N of your earlier posts is that BT's spam filters ARE as good as we could wish for, and I think that they are not. Sorry if my allusion to the comic George Carlin was not clear. His schtick was to point out the ways in which ordinary citizens are taken adavantage of (he used ruder words) by unaccountable big corporations (does this remind you of anything?)

I am not suggesting the 3 characteristics BY THEMSELVES be incorporated into a rule-based engine....each of them is individually is weak...but that TOGETHER they make a powerful identifying signal, and together with the training that my scores of reports, allied to those of other recipients who have done likewise (and there MUST be a few) has given, a competent pattern-matching filter should be able to learn this.

Neural network software is black-box stuff and no 'rules' can be drawn out to explain its conclusions. But I know from work in other fields that this signal should be sufficient unless those configuring it have required ZERO false positives. Which would be a mistake.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

Andy_N — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 16:08:41 GMT

@Thersiteswrote:
The implication @Andy_N of your earlier posts is that BT's spam filters ARE as good as we could wish for, and I think that they are not. Sorry if my allusion to the comic George Carlin was not clear. His schtick was to point out the ways in which ordinary citizens are taken adavantage of (he used ruder words) by unaccountable big corporations (does this remind you of anything?)
I am not suggesting the 3 characteristics BY THEMSELVES be incorporated into a rule-based engine....each of them is individually is weak...but that TOGETHER they make a powerful identifying signal, and together with the training that my scores of reports, allied to those of other recipients who have done likewise (and there MUST be a few) has given, a competent pattern-matching filter should be able to learn this.
Neural network software is black-box stuff and no 'rules' can be drawn out to explain its conclusions. But I know from work in other fields that this signal should be sufficient unless those configuring it have required ZERO false positives. Which would be a mistake.

We're both singing from the same songbook - mostly.

What I have not said or implied is that the spam filters are good as could be hoped. What I have said over many years is that spammers will be steps ahead, and the spam engines will catch up. This has shown to be the case when suddenly spammers manage to get their stuff through the anti-spam systems for a while until the systems catches up and learns the signatures etc.

This is probably what's happening at the moment with the "McAfee" example.

The anti-spam engines/learning systems could well be overloaded at the moment, letting through items it could deal with normally. So rather than a global block it could release the pressure by letting through spam normally blocked.

Re: Increasing levels of spam hitting my inbox

landie57 — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 16:59:17 GMT

Something else, which I suspect is related, legitimate email from a website is blocked, eg a password reset email. I already have another topic running on this.

If my memory is right this happened previously, something was changed and everyone started getting more spam. We posted this on the community and eventually BT fixed it. We can live in hope.