Known Sender Address Compare
I am not sure if this is even remotely possible given that people are using Mdaemon Webmail, Em Client, Outlook Connector, IPad Email etc as the email client, but if there is some way that this could be done it would make a huge difference in spam filtering.
Currently going round today is Bogus Boss emails where it says From "boss of my company", but the email address is abd543@gmail.com type thing. Unfortunately people don't look to see that the email address is different from the usual one. The person I was speaking to today literally had a legitimate email from her boss only moments before the fake email.
These Bogus Boss emails rely on people looking at the name of the person as the sender, not on the email address. However, the real email addresses are always in the contact list or whitelist as they communicate so frequently with their bosses and other colleagues via email.
If it is possible perhaps Mdaemon could implement some kind of check to see if the sender email address is already in the contact list or whitelist and if so sends the email on unchanged, but if it differs from the usual one, it could insert some kind of alert popup or very visual warning that the email address is different.
Maybe not even using the contact list and whitelist but some other method would work? This kind of scam email is becoming quite prevalent and there seems to be no defence against it as quite a number of schools in our area got an email like this and they are all using different mail servers.
Some kind of matching sender email address to sender name sort of technology needs to be created. I don't know if this is doable because people use so many different email clients with Mdaemon so I understand that it may not be possible to do this at server level.
Robert
shared this idea
Hello,
Thank you for sharing your idea to compare the real name in the From field of inbound emails to information stored in contacts. We have considered doing this in the past and have chosen not too because it is too easy to get it wrong. For example, what if you have a contact for Bob Johnson, but Bob’s real name is Robert and the From address on his email says Robert. This is just one example, there are all kinds of valid reasons why the names may not match.
the best approach we have come up with so far is that MDaemon can adjust the from header to ensure that the user is always able to see the Real Name and the email address. Some clients hide the email address. However, this functionality only helps if the user is looking at the information in the From header.
Thanks again,
Arron
-
Robert
commented
Hi Aaron, Yes I am aware that there are difficulties with this proposal particularly along the lines of the example you mentioned. My suggestion would be that the user has to approve/disallow based on review rather than an outright accept/reject concept.
It is a difficult one to implement I will grant you, but the gains would be worth it.