Does marking an email as Junk in email clients get the email reported to VM?

[sayling]

Possibly a general query regarding how emails are processed by VM spam filters...

Let's say I get an email purporting to be from Temu, or advising I have won a 170 piece Stanley Tool Set and it goes straight to my inbox, yet to be identified as Spam or suspicious. If I mark it as spam whilst in the web interface of my browser, I suspect it gets flagged as such to the mail detection services used by VM.

Would this also be the case if I just dragged it into the Spam folder?

If so, is it the act of placing it there that flags it, or the existence of the email in the Spam folder?

The reason I ask is because I rarely use webmail, but instead use Outlook. When in Outlook, I can mark it as Junk and the sender's email address is added to Outlook's block list and it gets moved to the Junk/Spam folder anyway - but I'm well aware that email addresses - and even domains - are not the only thing that Spam filters check to determine the legitimacy of an email and I'd like to assist the learning processes used by VM's Spam algorithms/AI/filters to enable better detection.

As they say... every little helps!

If all I'm doing instead is blocking email addresses/domains in my email client, it's a bit of a selfish act and only 'protecting' my Inbox after things have been through VM's filters and VM doesn't learn anything from this. But if the 'appearance' of an email in the Spam folder highlights the email for a potential learning point, all is well and good.

Otherwise, I guess I could just create a rule that forwards emails to both report@phishing.gov.uk and phishing@virginmedia.com and this could achieve a similar result? 

[用心棒]

Moving a message from or to Spam folder does not affect future handling of the same or similar messages as stated here:

⋮

Marking an email or sender as spam

If you mark a specific email as spam or not spam, the filter will move that email to the relevant folder. However, your account won’t remember to filter out future messages from that sender.
⋮

[source: How to stop spam e-mails | Virgin Media Help]

An issue with creating a filter rule to forward such messages to a reporting email address (for example, phishing@virginmedia.com) is the risk of submitting multiple reports for the same message; also filter rules do not run retrospectively so a new message would have to match the rule before submission would occur

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[sayling]

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@用心棒 wrote:

Moving a message from or to Spam folder does not affect future handling of the same or similar messages as stated here:

⋮

Marking an email or sender as spam

If you mark a specific email as spam or not spam, the filter will move that email to the relevant folder. However, your account won’t remember to filter out future messages from that sender.
⋮

[source: How to stop spam e-mails | Virgin Media Help]

An issue with creating a filter rule to forward such messages to a reporting email address (for example, phishing@virginmedia.com) is the risk of submitting multiple reports for the same message; also filter rules do not run retrospectively so a new message would have to match the rule before submission would occur

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I think I meant creating some VB or a macro to add sender details to Outlook's block list and forward the emails to the report addresses, for selected emails in my Outlook inbox, then move them to the Spam folder - but there seems little point in doing the latter if it is just acting as a auto-clearing dumping ground and nothing further is done with it server-side... Outlook appears to have the enhanced option of adding senders to block lists when marking an item as Junk, but - again - that's just a after-being-handled-by-VM-servers type thing

I guess I'm curious about how the 'Virgin Media Mail state-of-the-art technology' can be assisted, where it fails to identify items that are relatively obvious to the human eye, as per my examples. 

[coenoby]

@sayling 

The act of flagging an email as spam, whether you do it in a third party app or via VM webmail does not result in that email being flagged to the wider world as being spam.

"Outlook appears to have the enhanced option of adding senders to block lists when marking an item as Junk,"

In fact VM webmail also has a similar feature. You can add email addresses to a "Block List" in your VM webmail account which means that every subsequent email you receive from that address gets sent straight to your spam folder.  But again, there is no report sent back to VM, that blocklist only applies your VM email account.

As you say, email filters use a whole array of techniques to identify emails as spam. In many cases they use a points system to determine the probability that an email is spam so they do not necessarily rely on a single factor.

Email services do use blocklists (formerly called blacklists) provided by dedicated anti spam organisations.  These hold details of IP addresses and/or domain names which are considered to be sources of spam. 

Most use blocklists from dedicated suppliers that list IP addresses or domain names that have been identified as senders of spam. (Out of interest, from time to time even VM's own email servers have appeared on such lists 😮 before being swiftly removed 😰)

Spamhaus are probably the leaders in that field  and you can read more about them here https://www.spamhaus.com/ 

If you are interested you can check out the background to two of the many Spamhaus blocklists that are in general use by most email providers  - the 'SBL'  https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/ and the 'XBL'  https://www.spamhaus.org/xbl/ 

Finally, you say "I could just create a rule that forwards emails to both report@phishing.gov.uk and phishing@virginmedia.com and this could achieve a similar result?"

Yes you could, but bear in mind that the VM address is really only meant for phishing emails that claim to come from Virgin Media. That's my understanding anyway. The "phishing.gov.uk" address is your best bet.

Coenoby

[sayling]

@coenoby

"The act of flagging an email as spam, whether you do it in a third party app or via VM webmail does not result in that email being flagged to the wider world as being spam"

Makes sense - stops malicious activities by ne'er-do-wells, marking genuine items to cause domains to be blocked.

And I realise I don't really want to get domains blocklisted; I was hoping there was a way of - if you like - providing the spam filters with learning material from which they could look improve their algorithms.

Looking at all the abundance of crap currently being allowed through with multiple-case subjects and 'w0n' or 'have_w0n' or similar in the body, along with multiple non-secure links to php pages on domains unrelated to the purported sender, it seems fairly obvious to the human eye, yet they still persist. In numbers.

Yup, you're right about the VM phishing address - only interested in mail purporting to be from VM.

Perhaps the government could make mail providers more responsible for spam sent from their servers... that might help. But, as it stands, us minnows who want to help seem to be unable to.

Thanks to those who took time to read and respond.

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[coenoby]

@sayling 

Thanks for coming back.

Sorry, but I had to smile when you said "Perhaps the government could make mail providers more responsible for spam sent from their servers... that might help."

Have you seen the number of posts on this forum from VM customers complaining that Virgin Media is stopping them sending certain emails from their VM email account? These are cases were VM's outgoing spam filters have flagged the email as spam.

In many cases that's where people reply to an email and include the original email in their reply. If the original email has a url link to a site that has recently been flagged up as suspicious then VM block the reply from being sent. So VM's incoming mail spam filter let the original email in, but their outgoing filter blocks it from being sent out!

In fact major email providers have a vested interest in stopping their servers and domains being used to send spam. They certainly don't want their servers and domains appearing on spam blocklists.

You make an interesting point when you say "I was hoping there was a way of - if you like - providing the spam filters with learning material from which they could look improve their algorithms"

in 2015/6 VM switched from using the email service that Google provided to ISPs to the current service run by Ziggo in the Netherlands. When the present system was introduced VM did say that flagging an email as spam did help to improve the email filters..  In reality it did not seem to make any difference and VM quietly dropped any mention of it. They may well have changed their spam filtering to a different provider.

I certainly think you have made a good point about trying to improve spam filters and I don't mean to coma across as dismissive.

Finally, the  other thing to remember is that while the good guys are trying to make improvements to their spam filtering, the spammers and scammers are constantly improving and updating their techniques. I think it's safe to say that the organisations who manage and provide spam filtering products use very sophisticated techniques of intelligence gathering on new trends and developments in the world of spam.

I am sure that AI (Artificial Intelligence) will plays a big part in that.

Coenoby

Coenoby