How to Deal With Self-Directed Email Spam
In this week’s Tech 911 – our regular column that tackles the most pressing technical issues (which you can and should send us here ) – we’ll tackle a classic problem with an unusual twist: spam.
No one likes it when their inbox is full of shit, and most services nowadays are good at filtering out obvious messages that you shouldn’t deal with, such as those trying to extort money from you by teasing you for an even bigger payout, or those that promise to increase the size of your breasts and / orWillie .
But what if the person responsible for sending the spam you receive is … you? Lifehacker reader Karen writes:
Dear David:
I am receiving too much spam / junk mail. I block most of them. However, the scammers found a way to send it using my own email address as the return email. Since I cannot block my own email address, how can I find the real address they are sent from in order to block them? I use Outlook for my “business” email.
How … to block … yourself?
What happens here is that spammers spoof your email address in an attempt to bypass any spam protection you have. Unfortunately, depending on how your business is set up against spam, this is actually a pretty effective trick. You haven’t provided a bunch of details on what you are doing, but I think the first, best step is to find the bug in your IT team – if you have one – and get them to set server-side rules that validate not the email is sent from outside your organization, but using your organization’s domain as part of the sender’s (fake) email address.
This is actually not a process that I can talk to as I have never done it, but your IT team should be able to customize it. Also, whoever is in charge of your business infrastructure will want to make sure they have configured SPF, DKIM, and / or DMARC , which are all ways you can help establish that emails sent from your domain are genuine. (and the emails you receive messages that seem to be from your domain, but in fact are not, are correctly marked as spam).
If you have your own domain and your company is part of the same company, it is worth looking into what documentation your web host has for these three protocols. Your host can explain how to set them up in an easy-to-understand manner, which can give you a great tool in the fight against self-spam.
Without Outlook itself, make sure you take full advantage of the anti-spam capabilities of your anti-spam program. In my version of Outlook, I can access the Junk Email Filter by clicking the Home tab and a tiny Junk Email shortcut (to the right of New Email and New Items).
In the drop-down menu that appears, click on Junk Email Options and make sure it is enabled first of all and set to the level you are comfortable with. Definitely at least “low”; Consider high, but you will want to check your junk mail folder from time to time in case something legitimate hits the filter. You can also configure it so that only email addresses or whitelisted domains can go to your inbox, but that probably won’t solve your “sent from me” problem as it looks like you don’t necessarily want to block your own. E-mail address.
While I think about it, check your Sent Messages folder to make sure you are not spamming yourself. I doubt that this is the case, but if so, then this is a completely new problem: a problem that involves changing your passwords, disabling access to third-party applications that you linked to your email account, and so on. (In short, you’ve been hacked somehow, and spammers are actually hacking email from your address.)
You can try installing a third-party application like Mailasher to help you deal with spam. I haven’t used it myself, but it’s worth exploring the free version to see if it can actually help you reduce fake emails.
If you are still having problems, you can also try creating a new email alias in your company. Filter all messages coming from the “old” email address into the trash, and use this new email address only if you intend to send messages to yourself. This is a crude but easy workaround.
Finally, if you work as a team and only use your web host’s email capabilities to receive communications for your business, you might consider contacting them to make sure that you have enabled any and all anti-spam protection for your domain. You might also consider setting up a service like Google G Suite for your domain. It’ll cost you $ 5 a month, but Google’s built-in anti-spam capabilities are pretty impressive, and you can still use Outlook to view your emails if you want to.
Do you have technical issues that are keeping you awake at night? Tired of searching and troubleshooting Windows or Mac issues? Looking for advice on applications, browser extensions, or utilities that you can use to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below, or better yet, write to david.murphy@lifehacker.com .