Spam

  Spam has been a problem almost since the inception of e-mail. When unscrupulous sellers discovered that it was possible to blanket folks with advertisements for products at very little cost to themselves, the phrase ‘unsolicited bulk email’ was coined, and has been a nuisance to inboxes everywhere from that day forward.

  At Nikola Broadband we try to make the messages you want to receive land in your inbox, and the ones you do not end up somewhere else (like the bitbucket, or your Junk folder). Unfortunately we do not always succeed at either.

  Spam campaigns have evolved over the years, from one guy on Usenet filling your inbox with insulting messages, to the modern era where international criminal rings will try to sell you counterfeit pharmaceuticals, or try to trick you into giving them your credentials to online accounts where they might be able to obtain your financial information, or other personal information, for the purposes of identify theft. This second type of fraudulent email is more malicious in it’s intent, and is generally referred to as phishing.

  About 80% of the decision making process as to whether or not a message is considered to be spam and/or phishing is based on our various spam filters, however the other 20% comes from submissions by our e-mail users, those of you who have chosen to send spam samples, and help flag messages that were incorrectly tagged as spam .. but are actually good emails.

 

 

– What you can do about Spam and Phishing –

  Often at Nikola Broadband support we will recommend using our web interface to access your email account, it solves many of the problems of traveling, or being away from home. Authenticating to your mailbox using a software client from somewhere where the wireless access point may not be secure, or even when the hotel you’re staying at is firewalling the network ports typically used for the sending and receiving of e-mail.

  A quick introduction to a few of the tools available directly to our webmail users.

 

Flag an unwanted message as spam

  If a message was not identified as spam by our system, but you think it should be, please submit it to our spam filter for learning. Our Bayesian content filter learns to identify spam based off of the samples you send to it. Using our webmail, this feature is one click away. Highlight the message that you did not want to receive, and choose ‘This is Spam‘. It will be added to our spam learning system.

 

 

  Likewise, if our system has incorrectly identified a correspondence as spam, please let our filters know. Select ‘This is NOT Spam‘ , and then reply to the e-mail sender so they will be listed in your personal address book for future correspondence, and thus not receive future detrimental scoring as being an ‘unwanted’ sender.

 

 

Using authenticated message signing to combat phishing

  In May of 2017 Nikola Broadband opted in to participation in the Domain keys verification system. Messages to, and from, domains participating in Domain Keys can be verified for the authenticity of the sender through cryptographic key exchange. This cannot prevent all phishing scams, but if the blue check mark is present in the ‘Security‘ header (shown below), you can at least be certain the message is actually from the domain (such as @amazon.com) where it is purporting to have originated from.

 

  Anything that claims to be from your financial institution, but fails this security verification (you may see a red X instead of the blue check, or nothing at all) should be reported to phishing@nikolabroadband.com.

 

 

  Other resources

 

  If you are not able to use the web interface, we would still like to get your spam/non-spam reports, although it does require one additional step. Please forward the message that you would like to submit as spam or non-spam ‘As An Attachment’. This keeps the e-mail headers in tact, as unfortunately we cannot do anything for messages that no longer contain the original e-mail headers.

Please send that annoying spam (as an attachment) to:                                                                    spam@nikolabroadband.com

For a message that our system classified as spam, but isn’t, please forward the attachment to:          notspam@nikolabroadband.com

 

[1] How spammers get your Email address – https://www.howtogeek.com/