Spam from a gmail address

[#1]

I am receiving one, maybe two emails a day to one of my addresses from a gmail address (the same one each time), each however from a different 'sender' and domain. I report these as spam using webmail - note I don't download them as I use Mailwasher to filter ALL my incoming mail - but there appears no way to report the abusing originating address to Gmail.

Anyone got any advice?

[#2]

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse

[#3]

Pretty much everything relating to emails (as with telephones) can be faked, just delete them. Little or no point in reporting anything to anyone.

If there's any repeated consistency amenable to your email filtering/spam protection you could try adding some identification rules, but it will probably become ineffective as they change/evolve.

I find spam tends to arrive in bursts, after a few days something new takes over and they move on.

Recently I had dozens of apparent automated responses to complaints I'd raised to various bodies (none were genuine) but after a few days they just stopped arriving. I just deleted them as I knew they wouldn't stay in any consistent format.

[#4]

@MisterW Thanks - I'll report the next one I get. Couldn't find that form on Google - maybe I'm getting too tired 😀

@HPsauce I'm well aware of that thanks - and also aware of how to find the true origin of an email. I know I could set up rules within MW, but as you say, they (the sender) could modify something - in fact they do - the subject line and the 'sending' address.

This has been happening from the same source for over fortnight now. It is only a few clicks to 'bin'it, but it is a nuisance and I don't have the patience I used to have.

[#5]

@jab1 Good luck, though personally I wouldn't bother. I presume you're looking in detail at the headers.

However as a retired IT manager I can assure you these are not that reliable and can be faked too, or someone/something may just be exploiting a compromised account until the owner is alerted and secures it, or they just move on.

[#6]

@HPsauce I can but try. Yes I am looking at the detailed headers. One of the beauties of MW is that it allows for the full display of them, and if my experience over the past 2-3 weeks is anything to go by, apart from the 'sending' address and 'subject' they are identical, so even if they are 'faking' anything else, they are not doing it very well.

No natter - I shall report the next couple - cba to spend too much time on it, as deleting them is fairly simple/

[#7]

I have reported today's junk to Gmail - let us see if it has any effect. Doubt it will, but...

[#8]

@jab1 wrote: "and also aware of how to find the true origin of an email". 

Hey @jab1 . Reading your post, I`m curious if anyone can tell me if/how, when receiving a Gmail/email from someone, if one can discover the location that email/Gmail has been sent from? Like London or Liverpool etc...or even a town or city location?

I can only hover over the encrypted information where it shows the padlock symbol which gives the security information. But I wondered if it was actually possible to find out where that email came from if someone has doubts about the sender even being who they say they are?

I just want to cover myself for security reasons because as @HPsauce suggested, deleting emails we don`t recognize or trust is easy to do, but I`ve had in the past individuals contacting me who I stupidly gave my gmail address to for contact reasons other than using a private messaging system and although nothing sinister came about, those individuals still have that gmail address and I remain vigilant incase it falls into the wrong hands. Not that it will, but I`d hate to dismiss it entirely and all of a sudden find I have to close it and create a brand new account if it did.

Thanks for any input on this. 

Edited to add: It`s nobody on here by the way! 😉

[#9]

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@plusmouse wrote:

I`m curious if anyone can tell me if/how, when receiving a Gmail/email from someone, if one can discover the location that email/Gmail has been sent from? Like London or Liverpool etc...or even a town or city location?

No, can't be done for many reasons.

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@plusmouse wrote:

...  I wondered if it was actually possible to find out where that email came from if someone has doubts about the sender even being who they say they are?

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What I do is use my email client filtering rules to check the "From:" and "Return-Path:" header fields of new incoming messages, and then automatically <move> those from known senders to individual email folders associated with each sender.  Any emails remaining in the 'Inbox' are treated as unknown and therefore require inspection of the headers to determine whether I send the unwanted sender's message to the Junk/Spam folder, or if I need to create a new folder for that wanted sender and create a new filter rule to perform the <move>.

As I have my own domain names, I also tell every new correspondent to use a unique "To:" email address.

For example  tesco@mydomain.uk  or  doctor@mydomain.uk

I also include the "To:" check for incoming message filtering to detect whether my email address has been leaked,  so if I got a message claiming to be from my bank, but the "To:" field was (say)  doctor@mydomain.uk  then I would know that it was my doctor's office who has leaked my email address,  and therefore I have to write an even more specific filtering rule to separate out  my doctor's real messages from everything else associated with that email address.

Writing filtering rules might seem a faff, but once you've written the first one, you can simply copy it to a new rule then just tweak the "To:", "From:", "Return-Path:" fields and target folder as necessary.  Once you've get a few rules working, it is easy to keep on top of anything new appearing, and has the side effect of organising your wanted messages in to folders - so it is much easier to search through messages in the future, or apply retention rules on those folders to dispose of obsolete messages automatically if needed.

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[#10]

@plusmouse 'But I wondered if it was actually possible to find out where that email came from if someone has doubts about the sender even being who they say they are?'

You can find the originating email 'address', but it could be faked if the sender had enough knowledge to do it. However, my suggestion  is to ask yourself the question 'do I know this person/am I expecting a message from someone whose email address I don't know?' If the answer is 'no', then treat it with extreme caution.

My system is a little different to many people - I have a 'man in the middle' program which contains a list of everyone I correspond with, and any messages from those on that list are coloured green, so I can be 99.9% certain they are genuine - there is always the very slight chance they could have been 'hacked', but checking the message subject header should give you an idea if it is genuine.

Any other messages - from people/organisations not in my address book are identified with a different colour, and I treat them with caution.

With all due respect to @outcast , although his suggestion is workable, for someone such as yourself it is a pain to administer, and to be honest not one I would employ, although I could, fairly easily.

If you need any further help, just ask.

[#11]

Many thanks for that @jab1. What happened was, I was a member of a forum (now defunct) for a good while and posted helpful information and basically did what we do on here to be helpful and meaningful. After a while, one of the members sent me a PM asking for my email address. I always hesitate for obvious reasons but eventually gave it. At the time, I didn`t really have any major concerns and we traded emails back and forth for well over a year. They have a male name but I wouldn`t know one way or the other if they were male or not, but over time, they discussed their background, health, the fact they had divorced and were made bankrupt etc....I got the feeling this person had a bit of a past and wasn`t bothered about passing on their health details, address, even their national insurance number!!. They then apparently moved to another county. I, of course, deleted those details as I didn`t want them stored on my laptop. I was surprised he sent them in the first place but for all I know, they may have been false. I didn`t check to find out. 

The person then began asking me to use a password through a PROTON VPN email they had created when previously, they were happy just to use Outlook or Gmail. I asked a few times why the secrecy? Since anything we discussed wasn`t anything that required a VPN! They just replied that big brother was watching.....and they were starting to sound as if their attitude had changed even though ever since I told them my time was far more limited to reply to emails due to personal circumstances so they should perhaps just refrain from emailing anything they felt was private or sensitive. But he just kept sending the VPN link for me to reply with. I never did. 

After a few back and forth emails using gmail, mostly me asking why `he` kept sending me the PROTON email link asking me to sign in with the password, I stopped replying. I just didn`t feel comfortable engaging anymore when he couldn`t just use a normal everyday email as before. I really don`t know why `he` suddenly begun hiding behind a VPN, although he did speak a lot about government topics and probably got paranoid about `bots` picking up on key words! I told him he shouldn`t worry about that as he was only expressing his views and what was happening in his life. One of which was unemployment which I tried to help guide him through some of the benefits criteria. That was about it.

But since then, he`s never contacted me again even though I didn`t attempt to rely through the VPN email address he created for some strange reason. The reason I asked about could an email address have it`s location ID verified was to see if I could link where he said he was to that location but I doubt it. And given my lowly IT skills, I`d probably run rings around myself trying! 

Just to add, this person had three other `normal` email addressed he used (one Outlook and two Gmail) and then sprung the PROTON one on me for no other reason than to become faceless. It kind of took me by surprise but in the light of day, I`m pleased because some of the email`s he sent were very long and often repetitive and time consuming and being me, I did want to be helpful. Probably stupidly. 

The other thing was, if I `blocked` his emails, chances are he would be notified if he tried to contact me again so I`ve just not bothered. But if he does (using one of his `normal` email addresses, I won`t be replying to it, or even opening it. 

[#12]

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@plusmouse wrote:

...  if I `blocked` his emails, chances are he would be notified if he tried to contact me again

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Instead of blocking or rejecting such emails and possibly causing notifications,  you could create an email client filter rule that identifies the sender's email address in the header 'From:' field, and simply automatically delete them as and when they arrive.

Because it would be automatic and silent, the sender wouldn't get notified, and you wouldn't have anxiety from knowing that these unwanted messages are still arriving as you would never see them.

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[#13]

Fair enough @plusmouse . My advice would be to just delete anything from him - he does sound a tad paranoid - but as I said, anything from someone you don't 'know', treat with extreme caution.

Out of interest, how many email addresses do you have? Unless they have changed their policy/options, the 'man in the middle' I use has a 'free' version of their program, but it is limited to a single address, the one that covers more than one is now on a yearly licence - when I got mine, it was a 'lifetime' one.

[#14]

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@plusmouse wrote:

The reason I asked about could an email address have it`s location ID verified was to see if I could link where he said he was to that location but I doubt it.

The trouble with that logic, is that when you use Proton VPN, you can specify your apparent location to appear to be at any of their 12046 servers located in 117 countries,  so using geo-location tools to identify where an email came from would likely be useless.  Certainly if you were paranoid about being monitored, using Proton VPN make you appear to be in Switzerland and using Quad9 DNS (also in Switzerland) would be a good starting point.

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[#15]

@outcast : I like that idea about identifying the "from" address(s). Would I just go into the Gmail settings and change something then for this to be activated for one or more specific email addresses? Either that, I create a new Gmail address and just use the current one less and check it a few times a week. I didn`t want to have to do that and probably don`t need to. But it`s just that niggling voice in my head wondering if because this person now knows that Gmail address they could compromise it in some way. I don`t think they would given our `chats` were always well intentioned and mostly advice giving and conversations relating to one or two topics. But his paranoia about using a VPN and reading some of his `AI generated` replies on another forum and changing his username and asking the owner of that site to `delete` everything on his account and then recreated himself as someone else! Didn`t make much sense to me. 

@jab1 : I only have two email addresses. The Gmail one and an Outlook one. The Outlook email is older and used mostly for contacts with friends and eBay notifications so that has stayed private. The Gmail one I use more for emails or notifications coming in from Plusnet, my dentist or some other online transactions etc....so I tend to use it far more.

But yes....lesson learned.