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TL;DR look at the stuff in bold.
My university uses Office 365 for its email services. Unfortunately, either I accidentally put my e-mail out on some malicious site or someone who doesn't like me did. I receive anywhere from 20-50 spam/phishing emails in a day with subjects like:
- WOW! $25Ok Term Life-lnsurance for as Low as $10 Per Month!
- Stop Snoring Tonight, Guaranteed
- Jump-start your weight loss
Its really classic spam stuff. I get them from a bunch of different seemingly random emails and the subjects/bodies of the emails are too inconsistent to make rules against. I believe its coming from the same source because it just randomly started one day and was not a slow build up or anything like that. Furthermore, all of the emails have a similar "feel" to them (i.e. I can easily go through my email and pick out the ones that are spam and not just marketing emails from local businesses and university affiliates).
Examining the email senders it seems like whomever or whatever is sending me these is using a finite set of domains and compromised emails/email servers to cover their tracks and get around any spam filters and blocking mechanisms. Here are some examples but there are tons of different ones:
- bounces+1378653-e4ec-malohtie=outlook.com@sgd.investingdaily.com
- tannafaustus@aol.com
- CSkFTOd94Xp6npkNGW@laptop.hotoffreset.com
My attempts at reporting these emails to the university spam service and using Office's Junk Mail feature have been ineffective so I want to do it my own way. My plan is this. Since there are so many different senders and new ones pop up here and there, it would take me forever to manually keep adding these senders to an existing rule and/or manually create a new rule for these senders. I want to add these spam messages to a folder when I see them. Then I want to run a script on this folder which adds the sender's email to a rule which dumps any emails from that sender into a junk folder.
Is there any way to write that script in office and, if not, is there an API I can use to write this script in some programming language?
Alternatively, are there any good email clients besides Outlook that I could use which have a high quality spam filter? It may very well be the case that my proposed solution will not work.
Also, more generally, do you think this would be an effective solution? If you can think of another way to solve this, please offer an alternative solution. My email is constantly cluttered and I'm desperate to stop this, it is incredibly annoying and time-consuming. Also note I cannot simply get a new university email and I need it for official correspondence with the university.
Jack
Posted 2017-10-24T07:22:45.337
Reputation: 101
Attempting to block spam by blacklisting individual spam senders is futile. Do you have any two spam messages which have the same sender? – tripleee – 2017-10-24T07:24:32.903
The investingdaily VERP email address looks like they are using a mailing list. Many spammers do that, too; but maybe you want to make sure this isn't actually a list you signed up for yourself. – tripleee – 2017-10-24T07:25:21.450
Yes, plenty of them are coming from the same exact sender. Thats why I think this will work. – Jack – 2017-10-24T07:25:22.220
My first recommendation would be to see if you can avoid Outlook, but that's probably not the answer you want to hear. – tripleee – 2017-10-24T07:26:57.360
I could use a different email client but I still have to use my existing Office 365 email because the university provides it. Any recommendations on clients that work well with 365/outlook emails that filter spam well? Alternatively, I could block the domains of these senders but that might be casting too wide of a net (see the aol.com email). I've made some rules so far based on senders and that has cut down the amount of spam emails somewhat, so I know it works I just need to scale it. I know I won't get them all but really I just need cut the spam emails down to a more manageable level. – Jack – 2017-10-24T07:29:37.547
I know its typically futile to blacklist senders but I remember when this started I made an account on a pretty sketchy site the day before (I know that was really stupid, I wasn't thinking and was in a hurry). I think its coming from one spammer and there's enough consistency to make me believe this will work – Jack – 2017-10-24T07:37:32.873
Have you considered the Quick Step feature that's in Outlook? – Stephen – 2017-10-24T08:41:18.380
I have not, its not in my version (Outlook 2016 for mac). Maybe my best bet is to switch e-mail clients. Any good spam filtering clients for mac? I was looking at Airmail because the UI is really nice but I'm not sure if their spam filters will be any more effective. – Jack – 2017-10-24T19:50:39.717