Question What's the point of reporting an e-mail as a phishing scam?

[Craig234]

I don't mean the theoretical answer, that they COULD use the report for something, I mean the actual benefit?

I've gotten daily Hotmail e-mails claiming to be Apple-related that are phishing scams for years, and reported many of them, they keep coming daily. I don't see any benefit from reporting them.

 

[mxnerd]

Switch to gmail and you very likely won't see these scam emails again.

 

[jameny5]

Like New York Lottery say's, "Hey - You never know!"

Sent from my SM-T380 using Tapatalk

 

[pmv]

Maybe it's like those pedestrian crossing lights where the button isn't connected to anything other than an illuminated sign telling you to 'wait'? It makes one feel better to report it?

 

[Amol S.]

Switch to gmail and you very likely won't see these scam emails again.

That is not true. If that was the case Gmail won't have a spam folder nor would have a report this as spam. You probably need to set a setting that will placed a block rule for any email that you report as spam. Outlook has similar rules that can be implemented like that. Probably the OP did not set these rules in thier e-mail settings.

 

[IBMJunkman]

I recently got an email that appeared to be sent from a European e-magazine I subscribe to but the content looked like it was from Publishers Clearing House. I won $500k and a Toyota!

Forwarded the email to PCH and the e-mag. Analyzed the header and forwarded the email to the e-mail service. A day later they replied saying they had terminated the customer. A 2nd day later got an email from the e-mag saying they had a breach.

 

[Craig234]

I recently got an email that appeared to be sent from a European e-magazine I subscribe to but the content looked like it was from Publishers Clearing House. I won $500k and a Toyota!

Forwarded the email to PCH and the e-mag. Analyzed the header and forwarded the email to the e-mail service. A day later they replied saying they had terminated the customer. A 2nd day later got an email from the e-mag saying they had a breach.

If your post was a reply to my question, I didn't mean to ask what the benefit is of the sort of manual reporting you did, which had a good result - that's pretty clear.

I meant, what is the benefit to clicking the 'report as spam' button in the browser mail.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wait, are you talking about Spam, or Phishing? You wouldn't report a Phishing e-mail as Spam, no.

 

[compcons]

A decent service provider should be submitting those to their security vendor. A decent security vendor will use the information to make adjustments to their analytics/scoring algorithms to catch future attempts. The best vendors will use that submission to confirm the message as u wanted, actual threat, etc. And then provide a means of automatic remediation for the submitted message and any others that were sent with the same threat. That said, not all security vendors are equal and many providers seem to do nothing with the information at all.

For those situations, it may make you feel better for a little while.

 

[Craig234]

A decent service provider should be submitting those to their security vendor. A decent security vendor will use the information to make adjustments to their analytics/scoring algorithms to catch future attempts. The best vendors will use that submission to confirm the message as u wanted, actual threat, etc. And then provide a means of automatic remediation for the submitted message and any others that were sent with the same threat. That said, not all security vendors are equal and many providers seem to do nothing with the information at all.

For those situations, it may make you feel better for a little while.

I just don't see any reduction in the same scams sent for years.

 

[Spacehead]

I've gotten daily Hotmail e-mails claiming to be Apple-related that are phishing scams for years, and reported many of them, they keep coming daily. I don't see any benefit from reporting them.

Are you just clicking a button in Hotmail to "report as spam" or are you reporting these to Apple?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204759
"If you receive what you believe to be a phishing email that's designed to look like it’s from Apple, please send it to reportphishing AT apple.com"

 

[Craig234]

Are you just clicking a button in Hotmail to "report as spam" or are you reporting these to Apple?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204759
"If you receive what you believe to be a phishing email that's designed to look like it’s from Apple, please send it to reportphishing AT apple.com"

I'm just talking about the 'click report as spam' in Hotmail, that's what the thread is asking what the benefit is of doing that.

 

[Spacehead]

I would assume that Hotmail is supposed to "learn" from people reporting emails as spam. I'm not a Hotmail user so i don't really know. Did you look at ant support pages or FAQs there?

 

[Craig234]

I would assume that Hotmail is supposed to "learn" from people reporting emails as spam. I'm not a Hotmail user so i don't really know. Did you look at ant support pages or FAQs there?

Those pages tend not to give any specifics, just to say 'click to report'.

 

[compcons]

This all goes back to the quality of the detection. I would guess hotmail isn't using a very good anti-spam or threat detection service (Microsoft's?). Yahoo also uses a rubbish solution.

 

[JimKiler]

This all goes back to the quality of the detection. I would guess hotmail isn't using a very good anti-spam or threat detection service (Microsoft's?). Yahoo also uses a rubbish solution.

No one should be on Yahoo after all their hacks/breaches.