I recently received an email claiming to be from paypal (the SPF+DKIM passed) but inviting me to click on links in "epl.paypal-communication.com". How do I know this is not phishing? It certainly looks like phishing, and I certainly wouldn't click on those. But if it is not, how stupid must these guys be to use "paypal-communication.com"?

How do you fake DKIM though? That is as good as a TLS certificate.

I suppose someone might've taken over your browser or email client, but then it is game over anyway.

Perhaps PayPal should start MIME signing whole messages...

Which is why I think it was rather a moronic choice of domain on the part of paypal. But I know how to look for spf/dkim validation. A normal user (or a user using a mobile/tablet) will make a decision purely on the domain of a link.

Whois says it's owned by Paypal on MarkMonitor, but that can be faked, right? Or does MarkMonitor require email address validation? ([email protected] in this case)

Correct. But even if the whois wasn't fakeable, do I really need to run a whois before I click on a link in an email?

Almost like we need an ssl-like authority for email now. Ugh.

MarkMonitor specifically is pretty picky about only taking on large-scale corporations (google.com, amazon.com, microsoft.com to name a few) so just the fact that it's registered there is usually a reliable way to confirm legitimacy, but checking whois is still way more research than an average PayPal user should need to do to avoid being phished.

you forward it to [email protected], and then get a response pretty quickly telling you whether it was phishing or a real email.

Sadly, I don't think so: https://cantoriscomputing.wordpress.com/2017/03/04/paypals-e...

Also maybe Paypal should consider to stop sending "credit approval" spam from the same addresses.

I'd really like to see a customizable threshhold on what is and isn't spam. I've noticed a lot of mailing lists and things I did sign up for getting passed to junk, though periodically I try to mark them as "not spam" presumably enough other people mark similar messages as spam that my suggestions are overridden when new messages arrive. Something as simple as a slider to control how zealously the filter culls messages from the inbox might go a long way to making users feel more in control of the situation (whether such a control could be effective enough not to annoy users and have a real effect on the false positive rate is another question, so I admit there's no easy answer).

Never gonna happen, the big G knows the best for all. Even G Suite business users have to deal with the lack of controls here, even if we whitelist our own domain, things can get flagged by the larger Gmail spam filters that G Suite users are still subject to.

I discovered that you can make a filter that marks email as not spam. I use this to mark some logs I get from logwatch as legit.

Your link explains there are two cases in which Gmail shows e.g.

> '[email protected]' via Paypal-Admins <[email protected]>

namely:

> 1) The domain it was sent from doesn't match the domain in the "From:" address'

> 2) The email was sent to a Google Group from a domain that has a "p=reject or p=quarantine" DMARC policy

In my case, it's (2): The target email is a Google Group email (e.g. [email protected]).

Should that make the email more spammy though?

> “Emails that are sent from a domain that's different than the from address are legitimately suspicious”

That’s not how this works. The “from” email header has nothing to do with the actual sender due to the email standard. The actual sender is specified in the SMTP command.

This is why SPF and DKIM for example have nothing to do with “from” either. SPF refers to the sender in the SMTP command and DKIM signing can use the keys of a domain unrelated to “from” and it’s all legal.

It’s very easy actually to spoof the “From” header and Gmail won’t complain.

That “via” information you’re seeing is just another header that doesn’t have much to do with Gmail. If you’re seeing it, that’s because the sender wants you to see it.

Nobody said it wasn't legal according to specs, but that it's suspicious. And it is. Having a "From" header in the email that doesn't match the sender used for SMTP _is_ suspicious, and certainly should be an input signal for any spam filter.

Not suspicious at all. It's how mailing lists work.

From on the envelope will be address of the mailing list, and from in the headers will be the original sender. Perfectly legitimate and extremely annoying if anythig uses this as a SPAM signal.

Not suspicious for a mailing list, sure. But definitely suspicious for a security-related email from what is essentially a bank.

Why? They simply want bounces delivered to a differnt address than the real replies from customers. Seems reasonable if it's a from address used for a mass/automated mailing. (it is)

This was solved decades ago[0] with the Reply-To header. Send emails from [email protected] and set the Reply-To to [email protected].

Emails then bounce to no-reply@ and any legitimate email client will auto-populate support@ as the To address when the user clicks reply.

[0] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2076.txt

Sure there are alternatives, but it's still not suspicious. I just went through my "shopping" folder and more than a few comapnies have different From header domain and envelope From domain, including some big american ones like Airbnb who presumably know what they're doing.

Also PayPal was a contributor to DMARC RFC, so they presumably know what they're doing too around e-mail, wouldn't you say?

I get confirmations of flight reservations where env-From is mandrill app and From is kiwi.com. DMARC passes. Some of my banks do this, too. Registrar of my domains does this. Many others too.

It's just not suspicious and these are very important senders to me (I mean I'd hate to fail to renew my domain, or miss that one-in-a-lifetime e-mail that someone is withdrawing money from my bank account other than me, because of a braindead SPAM policy) and google should not care.

Note that DMARC modifies the meaning of SPF. SPF without DMARC protects the envelope-sender and not the From header.

With DMARC SPF protects the From header as well.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC maybe useful against fishing. In the long run it doesn't do anything against spam. So it is rather unfortunate that gmail (certainly on IPv6) is so eager to classify mail without those headers as spam.

> It’s very easy actually to spoof the “From” header and Gmail won’t complain.

Which is why Gmail will use this as a signal for spam and why Papal should have them match.

Also, every website asks you to check the spam folder if the verification mail hasn't shown after a couple of minutes, it's not like you lost it forever.

> every website asks you to check the spam folder if the verification mail

This is not a registration email that you expect to receive after clicking somewhere on a website.

This is the kind of email that says "something important happened to your account you may not be aware of, you should really know this; if it wasn't you, you are now in danger".

(Of course in this case it was me, but the whole purpose of this type of email is to alert you promptly in case it wasn't you.)

Does it make sense to send such vital notifications via a channel that can silently hide them? This is ideal for mobile push notifications, and if you want reliable notifications, you should install the PayPal app.

An unsolicited email is not going to get noticed in the hundreds of spam emails I get on a weekly basis (currently 189 since February 3).