Question Unusual Spam Problem

horstp

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Jul 17, 2018
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So, obviously I have tried to google this issue, but so far I couldn't find anyone with exactly the same problem.

Here's what's happening:

Every now and then, I'd say about one to three times per week I get an email under the name of someone that sounds vaguely familiar. These names vary, but there is only so many, maybe ten different ones the emails are alternating between. I am quite certain that none of those people are or have every been in my address book (neither the Outlook one nor my webmai one) and I don't think I have ever emailed those people either. I do think, however, that chances are that several years ago I would have been recipient to an email going out to a larger group of people with these names being those of other recipients. This was before widespread awareness of the BCC functionality, so all the addresses would have been visible to all recipients of those emails.

Now the tricky bit is, that while the name associated with the emails I am receiving is always the same (i.e. one from this list of ten or so people), but the email address and domain is different every time. I would like to teach Outlook to filter these out, but since the email addresses and domains keep changing, I don't know how to do this. Also, since my email address is webmail, even if I could set up Outlook rules, I would still receive the junk mail on mobile and when logging in from other PCs, such as my work laptop.

Is anyone here familiar with this style of spam and is there an easy enough fix for this?

Thanks in advance!
 

horstp

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Jul 17, 2018
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With Outlook you can create a rule to junk these by Create Rule (dont select anything) > Advanced Options button > and selecting 'With Specific words in the Senders address" and then add those names into the list.
Thank you! Does this include the name that is associated with the email, but not actually part of the email address? For instance, I get an email from "john smith" but the email adress could be info@scrummsavers.com or something like that.
 

horstp

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Jul 17, 2018
153
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I created the rule now, but it does not seem to work, none of the spam messages are captured. Probably because those names are not actually part of the sender's address?