More Scam and Phishing Emails

More Scam and Phishing Emails: a reader asked,

I have started getting recurring emails from CVS, AARP, AAA Roadside Service, and others that are getting annoying. I followed your advice and checked the From address, and they are coming from random email accounts, so that means they’re fake. But because they come from different email addresses each time, my spam blocker doesn’t seem to be able to stop them. Is there anything else I can do? I use Outlook (Classic) on a Windows 11 PC.

There do seem to be new players on the dark web lately who’ve bought email lists and simple scam/phishing templates. That explains why we’re all getting more of these junk emails. And yes, they use rotating fake email accounts to send them, so standard block-sender features (like what you’re using in Outlook) won’t be effective. Here’s what you can do:

Outlook has a “Rules” function in the ribbon toolbar, which you can use to highlight language in the offending emails’ subject line, and create a rule to automatically move these into your Junk Email folder. Here’s how. Do this for each type of recurring junk email you’ve been repeatedly receiving:

1. In your Outlook inbox, select (but don’t open) the email. On the Outlook ribbon, click Rules > Create Rule. A “Create Rule” dialogue box will appear.
2. Click the checkbox next to “Subject contains”. Then click the checkbox “Move the item to folder” and a Rules and Alerts box will open for you to choose a folder – click the Junk Email folder and click the OK button. That will close the box and you’ll be back at the Create Rule window.
3. Click the OK button to apply the rule. You’ll see a popup that will let you click to run the rule on your inbox, do that and click Ok.

The rule will run and move all matching emails from your inbox to the Junk Email folder. When you do this on the next email, it will be even simpler, because the Junk Email folder will be pre-selected. One variation you can do is adjust the words in the Subject Contains box if the subject line is too personalized, but be careful not to make it too general or legitimate email could be affected.

You can play around with the rules, setting alternate or additional conditions to get these recurring junk messages to stay out of your inbox.

Finally, it should go without saying that you should regularly scan the list of messages in your Junk Email folder to see if there are any false positives in there (emails that are not junk). If you see any, right-click on them, and select (on the popup menu) Junk > Not Junk. You’ll need to click an OK button that pops up to trust email from that source. Once some time has passed and you’re not finding any false positives in your Junk Email folder you can spend less and less time reviewing the contents of the folder.

And, as the Junk Email folder collects more and more junk email, you can select and delete all messages older than when you last reviewed the folder. I like to clear out all messages older than about a month or two, sending them to the deleted items folder. And I also like to permanently delete messages that are in the Deleted Items folder that are older than three months, by highlighting them (select an old message, hold down the shift key and select the oldest message on the list to highlight everything in-between) and tapping the Delete key. You’ll need to confirm this to permanently delete them.

Outlook does have an AutoArchive feature built-in, but I’ve found that doesn’t work reliably. By manually deleting messages, I know exactly what I’m deleting and won’t lose anything I’m not sure I intended.