Any way to block spam spoofed from your own email address?

General discussions and other topics.
7 posts Page 1 of 1
by patty1 » Fri May 13, 2022 11:41 am
My inbox has recently been getting several spam emails every day that have been spoofed with my own email address as the sender. Obviously I don't want to block my own address in Sonic's blacklist settings, but is there any other way to reduce such spam? Blocking by subject keywords is a possibility, although words like "reward" and "congratulations" and "survey" could show up in legitimate email messages, too, so that approach is dicey.
by dane » Fri May 13, 2022 12:25 pm
We do block millions of spam messages daily, including many that are "From" your own email addresses. You can tweak the anti-spam system scores if you want it to be more aggressive, but that causes some risk of blocking legitimate emails. The system errs on the side of caution in regards to that.

Email is unfortunately not inherently trustworthy. Like a postal letter's envelope, anyone can write anything they want to as the "From" address. The internet has many components like this, leftover from a kinder, gentler past.
Dane Jasper
Sonic
by patty1 » Fri May 13, 2022 1:10 pm
Dane, you're talking about this page, right?

https://members.sonic.net/email/spam/scores/index.php

Are there any specific scores you know of that would address this situation?
by drew.phillips » Fri May 13, 2022 4:47 pm
Hi Patty,

Quite frequently we see this type of thing happen if someone has added their own email address to the allow list, so I took a look at the welcome list for your account and see that your email address is in the list.

There's a good chance our system did flag this as spam, but allowed it through because of that entry.

These days, there's no need to have your own address in that list as anything you actually send to yourself will be delivered, but it does allow for these types of spoofed messages to make it through when they often would not.

I'd be happy to remove the entry for you if you'd like, or you can do so using the link above.

Thanks for posting about the issue. Have a wonderful weekend!
Drew Phillips
Programmer / System Operations, Sonic.net
by dane » Fri May 13, 2022 6:10 pm
Nice catch Drew, thanks for going the extra mile.
Dane Jasper
Sonic
by patty1 » Sat May 14, 2022 10:16 am
Yes, thank you, Drew! I wouldn't have guessed that my own email would safely arrive without being whitelisted. (Sometimes when I'm out on the porch reading on my iPad I like to send news articles to myself so I can read them them later on my main computer.) I deleted both my main email address in my own domain and my Sonic.net address, so I hope that reduces the spoofed spam.

Thank you both for your help.
by patty1 » Tue May 17, 2022 9:47 am
Update three days later:

# of spam messages with forged senders that have been routed to my inbox: 0

# of legitimate messages I've sent to myself that have gotten trapped by graymail: 0

Many thanks to Drew and Dane and the whole Sonic team.
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