Virgin Media Community

[coenoby]

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@Whatsisname wrote:

Free Mailwasher is in place and seems to work quite well, though the icon in the taskbar says mailw'r pro!

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It's been a while since I used Mailwasher but I found it great as a first line of defense. What I really liked was that it meant that spam messages did not even get downloaded into my email client!

As far as I know, the free version is exactly the same as the paid for pro version. The only difference I was aware of was that the spam blacklists for the paid for version were updated in real time whereas the free version gets updated once a day (or whatever).

Coenoby

[Jen_Y]

Thank you for posting on our forums, sorry to hear you're getting alot of Spam mail come through. I have passed these examples over to our team so we can investigate further. 

We'll be back in contact with any further information we receive. 

Thank you. 

Jen Y 

[BillC45]

As Tim has just demonstrated, Amazon Web Services appears to be a source of Spam emails (albeit based only on a random sample of 3 such emails). Conclusion? AWS is making it too easy for the spammers to send Spam via AWS.

It is absolutely self-evident that stopping these emails from entering the Global e-mail system would be a much more efficient means of culling this traffic than relying upon the multiple receiving services tackling the problem in a multitude of varying ways.

So, should we all be writing to Jeff Bezos of Amazon – the world’s richest man until recently – to tell him to do something about it? Hmmm. He may be somewhat preoccupied with his current divorce settlement which is reportedly costing him $70 Billion and thus promotes Bill Gates back to the number 1 spot. Don’t hold your breath.

[HowardML]

This might help people follow BillC45's excellent suggestion until VM Security can get to discuss with AWS what to do about this torrent of rubbish:

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/report-aws-abuse/

But I recognise the individual spam reports are of limited value unless AWS get a torrent of them. They are a bit complicated to send because of the way that VM's outgoing spam filtering works on mail that has been classified as incoming spam - as many of you know, the outgoing filters block such mail. Forwarding would work OK on mail that is spam but has not been classified as such and so ends up in your in-box.

And welcome to @Jen_Y . The Superusers have raised the issue of spam from AWS addresses in their private discussions with the VM Forum Team. I hope this is an acknowledgement of the undertaking they have given us to pursue further?

[ravenstar68]

@Jen_Y - Welcome to the email forums and to the Forum Team

I don't know if you have access to the Superuser Forum but I have added some findings to a thread in there, Kev_B has acknowledged that thread as well.

I do hope Liberty Global take what I've posted on board, as there is definitely a legitimate way of blocking these mails from even entering people's spam folders.  I'm not going to detail the full ins and outs here, but it simply has to do with best email practice on the senders part 😉

Tim

[ravenstar68]

@BillC45 

Technically it wasn't a random sample, as I was only looking at emails from this specific domain.

However if we add in some other well known domains that have been mentioned on the board

raysoutdoors.com.au for example.

We see the same thing particularly where the email body also takes a specific format.  So I actually have far more then the 3 emails from at least 3 domains that have all come from AWS's servers.

Tim

[BillC45]

@ravenstar68 

Tim

Agreed. I was merely attempting to deflect (by anticipating) any “you’ve only checked 3 emails” post - thus reducing the need for you to respond and quote every email and domain you have looked at on this subject.

Bill

[Whatsisname]

Hi HowardML,

                     Your;  "VM's outgoing spam filtering works on mail that has been classified as incoming spam - as many of you know, the outgoing filters block such mail."

The outgoing email addresses carrying spam reports can have the filter lifted for what needs to be proven as a proper spam reporting address. We have Jen Y to thank for getting the block lifted on  reportphishing@antiphishing.org some while ago.

[HowardML]

How true. And thank you for pointing this out. Kudos deserved and given. But realistically I'm not sure how far this ban lifting has gone and we are taking action behind the scenes to avoid users having to go down this path.

[ravenstar68]

Just for the record - It’s Jen_A who got the block lifted, not Jen_Y

Although the error is understandable.