I recently switched my mail/domain from Google to name cheap. I’ve been keeping a critical eye on my junk mail as the spam filtering doesn’t seem as good.
I saw neat scam email from my own email adress. It was the usual “I am a hacker give me money” nonsense but the trick with them using my own email adress is pretty neat. I assume they’ve injected some sort of common replace string?
Just curious if anyone knows the trick here.
Update: followed the advice most of you have provided and spam mail has gone way down as a result. Leaving post here for the next poor sod who runs into these problems. Maybe Google will lead folks here instead of reddit.
Thank you kind strangers.
If you’re running your own domain and mail server with everything validated via SPF and DKIM etc then this layer of spam filtering won’t do anything. Other spam filters like AI-based ones that look at the contents of message for spammy stuff need to take over after that point.
Fighting spam is constant cat-and-mouse battle and you’ll never truly get rid of all of it.
And you don’t even need SPF or AI to discard mails coming from the wrong mailserver. If you know the domain, you can do a lookup and see if the connecting mailserver is the one in the MX record. Check PTR records. At least throw away mail that’s coming from some random server and claims to come from your own domain. You should know who is supposed to be a mailserver for your addresses.
This isn’t really going to be accurate all the time. It is a totally reasonable configuration to use a mailserver not in the MX records. Lots of companies that send automated emails use a service like mailgun or sendgrid as a relay, which isn’t their MX server. It doesn’t come from their company’s mailserver. The only way to validate that is by adding mailgun/sendgrid as an include in the SPF record.
PTR records are very difficult to maintain for any accuracy since lots of companies use cloud providers and don’t bring their own IPs.
You’ll often miss things like “Your credit card expired” or “please change your password” or even “Here’s your monthly bill from the power company” emails.