Spam Protection Guide - Section 5

Still receiving spam? Even from your own email address or domain name?

Training the spam filter

Unfortunately, no spam filtering system can be perfect. Spam messages can get through and sometimes, legitimate emails can be marked as spam.

You can help improve the effectiveness of our spam filters by letting us know if spam emails are still reaching you, or legitimate emails are being seen as spam. See our article Reporting Spam Emails for full details.

I'm receiving spam from my own email address / domain!

One common technique employed by spammers is to use your own domain name or email address to send spam.

This is for two main reasons. Firstly, if you see an email that is possibly from yourself, a family member or a colleague, you are more likely to read it, or at least notice it is there.

Secondly, it can help spammers to avoid blacklists.

A blacklist is a list of email addresses or domains that an email user chooses not to receive any email from. As you may be sending copies of emails to yourself, or using a domain name along with other people, you are very unlikely to blacklist your own addresses.

Alternatively, you may put your own email address or domain into a whitelist. Any email arriving from an address or domain in the whitelist will be automatically marked as not spam, helping spammers to get messages through which may otherwise be blocked.

A common worry is that receiving these emails apparently from 'yourself' means that your username and password details have been compromised. This is not the case. The person sending the spam has simply changed the 'From' address of the email, they do not require any access details for your account to do this.

By following the steps we have shown previously, you will help to reduce the number of such spams that will be delivered. You can also forward the details to our spam training facility as explained above. This uses the full content of the email, not just the 'From' address, so you will help to reduce such emails in the longer term.