Anyone have a grey/blacklist of vendor emails to block to reduce spam?

Posted by TxTechnician@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 14 comments

I messed up, and my email got out on a public forum. Now I'm getting every damn Marketing Tool/RMM/{insert other IT specific tool} hitting me up. I'm thinking it would be best to use a greylist to mark all of these vendor domains with a rule to go to a "notQuiteJunk" folder. If someone has such a list. Or if someone has another suggestion. Or can recommend a tool.

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14 Comments

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badlybane@reddit

Ignore the top part of the meme ![gif](giphy|vfB0liiCJqbTAUNpIX|downsized)

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yankeesfan01x@reddit

This is my general rule of thumb. If a vendor sends me an email because I signed up for a webinar to keep up-to-date or learn something new, let them have their one sales email. If they send a follow up email after I don't respond, domain = blocked.

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BaconEatingChamp@reddit

Cisco (probably others, but not Microsoft) has Graymail filtering in their solution which holds bulk & marketing email for us. We hardly get any of that junk anymore. It's one of the main reasons we are still keeping it as a first line of defense before mail hits Microsoft.

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Arudinne@reddit

Goddamn I miss my company being on Google Workspace. Their spam filtering was so much better than Defender's.

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tankerkiller125real@reddit

I have a mailbox rule that moves anything with headers from the major marketing tool vendors directly to spam tenant wide. I wanted to use the X-Unsubscribe header, but discovered that a bunch of legit emails for things like password resets and what not use senders that have that header hard embedded.

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GeneMoody-Action1@reddit

Man, if I did I would be rich. Employing the standard Spam, RBL, Ip Reputation, etc... Is about as good as it gets. Also your email will make it on lists like this as a byproduct of doing business, in ways you will never track down or understand. Some of the real hurdles you would face would be that many of them mas market through legitimate services other companies use, and the constant influx would like trying to shoot flies. Spam is a part of life, of the flood you cannot avoid, you plug the holes where you can (Services), mop up as best you can after (Rules), and deal with the carpet being damp (Junk mail)

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minektur@reddit

Lets not forget the passive-aggressive one-line "UNSUBSCRIBE" emails to what are very likely human beings rather than mailing lists. Those don't really help but it makes me feel better. If I get something after that, then I respond with "less passive": "Congratulations! Your domain just got added to our company wide block list." Again, it doesn't help much in the long run but me imagining a human on the other end of the email reading it and being irritated makes it worth it to me. The fake "middle of the email conversation" pretext emails I get really make me grit my teeth though. No, I will not "circle back around" with you to "continue" discussing your random BS. I might go straight for blocking at least the email address company-wide.

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tankerkiller125real@reddit

Park Place Technologies (yes I'm going to name and shame because fuck them), sent me 4 emails, 3 meeting invites, and called 3 times in the span of 45 fucking minutes one morning. I absolutely ripped into the sales guy for that BS, and then promptly blocked every phone number I could find for their business, and every domain I could find that they owned.

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fosf0r@reddit

4-tier "self-reply" message.... I go check the logs... never emailed us before in their life

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Nitro_NK@reddit

I block all emails that have "Unsubscribe" button in them. It catches a few good emails, but the 1000s it saves me from is worth it.

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ephemere_mi@reddit

I ended up making an Outlook rule that moves all messages from external senders to a separate folder in my mailbox. The only external messages that make it to my inbox are those that I've explicitly allowed (trusted vendors, etc.). I do have to review what went into my "filtered" folder every couple of months or so. I customized the view settings for that folder so that I can see the full email address in the message preview. I just sort it by sender and delete, delete, delete. Occasionally I find something of value in there, and I make a new exception in the rule.

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bardwick@reddit

Without a service, you're pretty well screwed. There are dozens, if not hundreds of marketing companies that now have that email address. Almost certainly tied into linkedin lead generation products which will lead to more and more..

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TinderSubThrowAway@reddit

New email address. Forward known good emails from old address to new one. Keep old one and check it once a week for anything that falls through the cracks. Delete the old one in 6-12 months.

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Anodynus7@reddit

I mean, if its unsolicited it is still junk and would treat it accordingly tbh. What spam vendor are you using? Some have grey listing built in (mimecast, xeams, spamtitan) Others have decent scaling controls to prevent (Barracuda). Others like EOP do not have this feature built in and would still rely on a rules or scale. Kinda opened a trail to try to answer this one for me ha. Like if you were wanting just a giant block list that just wouldnt work very well tbh . You are going to have to narrow down the definition of what gets blocked on your respective filter and whitelist accordingly.