Phising email from Amazon

[#1]

Phishing emails labelled as coming from <account-update@amazon.co.uk> keep being received - asking for password updates.

The Plusnet spam filter should be trapping these, but it does not. I cannot find any way to report this to Plusnet support. There should be a dedicated reporting link, so the spam filter can be updated.

Someone is bound to fall for this scam, so it needs to be checked.

[#2]

By what criteria do you assert they "should be" caught by the spam filter?

To be caught by the spam filter emails need to fit a known / defined profile. Scammers are very good at varying the characteristics of their phishing emails. Spam filtering is simply not as simple / good as some might wish it were. Have you examined the headers of these emails to see how much (if any) similarity they contain? Do they really come from the visible email address? How can you be so sure? Spoofing someone else's email address is not difficult.

Spam filtering from the apparent email address is potentially dangerous as real email from that address could be blocked as well.

Where do you want a link to report emails as being spam? Such functionality would have to exist in the email client (people would soon complain if any email provider interfered with the email content, to for example insert a link). The Plusnet webmail application already provides functionality for reporting items as being spam ... it is through that process that the plusnet spam service becomes more aware of what the bad eggs look like that bit quicker.

[#3]

Spam email can be difficult to identify by automated recognition. So it may or may not be possible, and each case just needs to be assessed by relevant support staff. At least they will be made aware of new scam formats and this may help improve their filtering systems.

Banking customers are common targets for phishing. To help identify these, they provide a dedicated email address to which suspect emails can be forwarded. Perhaps Plusnet support could set up something similar. If they already check the Spam folders in Webmail, the same checks could be applied to Spam email forwarded to them.

[#4]

To the best of my knowledge, Plusnet does not have a little army of staff manually looking at emails to profile spam.  On the basis that the spam engine has already moved an email item to a spam folder ... there's no need for Plusnet support to look at them.

Marking something as SPAM through the web mail interface, sends the mail item to the spam engine to help improve spam content profiling.