One great thing about digital sovereignty is that you can dismiss phishing email attempts out of hand. I am my own email admin, after all!
This one I received today is so obviously fake it almost makes me nostalgic for the old days, when we could go to snopes.com to verify whether an email was a scam or not and read amusing tales about the wily ways of spammers and how they can be waylaid.
Telltale signs:
- poor spelling
- unknown from email address
- unknown url behind call to action link
Still, it’s worth being vigilant, and to not follow links in emails that look suspicious without looking at them first.
As a self-hoster, I can go further than just checking the spelling, email address and urls in the message. My mailcow mail server comes preconfigured with Rspamd, an open source spam filter. It can be adjusted to be more or less strict via the UI, but I have not changed it from the defaults which for me personally have been solid.
One feature it has which I like is grey listing. If it comes across an email sender it has not seen before and is not obviously spam (or ham, the email we want) Rspamd rejects the email sends it back to the sender to ask for verification. Alot of spam never reaches me because of this. But after 10 minutes or so legit email is sent again and lands in my inbox.
You can see that happened here with this spam message, as viewed in the Rspamd log. The green items are good, red are bad. This one was in the greylisted zone but came from a reputable mail server, so it wasn’t rejected outright.
I’ll reach out to the postmaster for that domain to let them know that it appears their mail server is being used to send phishing spam.
