Over the past few months I have been consistently receiving a bunch of unbelievably annoying spam emails in my Gmail inbox. I get three or four of them a day, usually, over the course of the day. I always flag them as spam, and they KEEP COMING.
They always follow the same form: Sender is a fake female name, subject is always the promise of a “video” featuring some other fake female name, then in the body of the email is some insidious attached file.
Here is a screenshot I took of my spam folder. Look for yourself.
MOST of them are in my Spam inbox. If you look at the times, you’ll see that I’ve gotten dozens of them just today. But three to five of them always wind up making it into my main inbox every day. I flag them; they keep sneaking in.
It sounds like these are not hugely widespread - I can find a couple of mentions of them but not many. No sign of similar spam on my radar (but email spam is not my thing).
Best guess is, they’re staying under the radar by spamming only a relatively small number of people.
To clarify again: are you using the Gmail.com web interface? And are you hitting the “Report spam” button as shown here?
If reporting them as spam doesn’t work, then maybe try assigning them to a filter such as junk or a specially assigned one like ‘Gmail, I told you this was spam.’
It’s best to avoid rolling your own filter like that. For one, if it were as simple as filtering comments with a common feature, Gmail would already be catching it - the fact that they’re not suggests it’s more difficult. And two, it means Gmail’s filter doesn’t get spam reports from you, so you’re missing your chance to train it.
It’s hard to see what they have in common without reading the full messages, but you can at least filter many of them out with:
has:attachment filename:html [or whatever extension they actually end with] "in attached file" subject:(video OR message)
The number of legitimate emails you get that say “in attached file” in the message, mention a video or message in the subject, and then actually attach an HTML file should be pretty low.
To be safer, you can whitelist your regular contacts by pretending to compose a message to the entire group, copying the resulting list of names, and then using that in the filter surrounded by brackets, like:
And if you do go the custom filter route, this page suggests labeling them all with a custom label. You can check it once a week or so and mark the whole bunch as spam, thereby training Gmail.
What infuriates me is that the laws against computer intrusion – and deliberate steps to defeat spam filtering are clearly attempts to get into someone else’s computer knowing that you’re violating a KEEP OUT notice – are not enforced, even to the extent of making a few examples. I’d prefer a few heads on spikes, but I’d be grudgingly satisfied with a few 5-10 year sentences.
It’s not a question of failure to enforce. It’s the inability to track down those responsible. The spam industry learned years ago how to structure and divide the business so that no single person or entity can be unambiguously held responsible for sending spam. Each of the parties involved plays a small independent part that’s legitimate, or nearly so; at most they can be accused of failing to prevent someone else from spamming, and if anyone does point the finger at them, they can easily claim to be innocent victims exploited by someone else.