Junk Mail around Christmas…

Junk Mail has become another everyday problem, but around Christmas it really does get out of control.. For the past few weeks I have received in excess of 50 junk emails per day. So what’s the problem with that?

The main problem is that it is very hard to having to spend an extra half an hour everyday just to filter the junk folder to see if one of the “Good” email ended up in there by mistake. Normally is not hard to spot the good email, if you only get say 4 or 5 junk emails per day.

But for instance, just yesterday I had an enquiry from France and I nearly delete it by mistake because surrounded by another 50+ email from company like Amazon, Ebay and all the other company where you may have purchase a pair of pants six years ago and for some unknown reason they decide to start a lifetime email friendship with you. I know, stupid me for providing the email address at the purchase time..

None the less, the French customer ended up spending good money on the shop and I could have lost the lot if I had deleted his enquiry. So, yes, junk mail does and can cost you money.

Then we got Russia. I’m beginning to believe that 50 or possibly 70% of the Russian Ecommerce is based on Viagra, porn and junk mail. Just in the month of November my WordPress junk folder received 1492 email from Russia. We are at a point that most website now are preventing any Russian IP address at the door. That’s a pity because I’m sure that the other 30% of Russian are good people and not been able to access any site just because your IP is Russian is simply not fair.

 So I decided to keep a list here of possible solutions to mitigate the problem, as I don’t think is possible to eliminate it completely.

Lets start with junk from Amazon.

Amazon send most of junk using AWS. When you receive an email like this one on the right you may think is from Jesus Christ, but you would be wrong.. But you would be also wrong into thinking that Amazon or AWS purposely sent you that email. They just got hacked and now the spammer is using their server to distribute junk mail.

This is an email from AWS about a “Magic Oil”.

I got another 40+ all from different sender:

Jesus, God, the IRS, Diabetes Destroyer and so forth.

Because they use different name all the time, it would just make it impossible for any spam filter to work as the name is different every time. While the sender name is different most of the time, the actual email is not. For instance this email about Jesus oil is also under the sender name of God and the Biblical error..

The easier way to check the true origin of the email is to use the option “View Source” that most email programs do have. Once the email is open in source mode you actually get to see where it really came from..

ARC-Authentication-Results: i=1; mx.google.com;
       spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of epejfniun@vatqr---vatqr----
us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com
 designates 34.192.109.4 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=epeJfniuN@vatqr---vatqr----
us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com
Return-Path: <epeJfniuN@vatqr---vatqr----us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com>
Received: from 3s47.q53nemacia.com (ec2-34-192-109-4.compute-1.amazonaws.com. [34.192.109.4])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id h21si29652qkg.116.2019.12.03.16.29.44

The Source is quite long but this bit at the start has all you need to find out who really is the last sender..

We have several times the name of amazonaws.com but more importantly we have also the IP address 34.192.109.4 If you simply do an IP search you can easily see that the IP address belong to Amazon Like the majority of people I did purchase stuff from Amazon and yes my email is therefore in their system

None the less, if you are or have been receiving a lot of unsolicited email from AWS you can go HERE and ask them to remove your email from any of their daily junk. As long as Amazon or AWS has your email in their hacked system, you will receive junk from AWS! Please remember that they are not the original sender but just the last sender that your email was received from. So no need to be rude to them as the problem is much bigger..

Another easy way to stop a bit of junk even reaching your spam folder is to use a “Message Filter” that is again available in most if not all email programs.

There are tutorial on how to achieve this: For Thunderbird HERE.   For Gmail HERE.   For Outlook HERE.

I also use a list of “keywords” used by most Spammer, so that if that word is to be found anywhere in the email, it gets automatically deleted. This list is designed to be used in WP, but there is no reason of why it cannot be used for a filter in your prefer email program..

I will add here more tips or solutions as they come across..

Til then..