spam

New Gmail Spam Filtering Rules: Check Your Spam Mailbox

If you use Gmail, as millions of people do, or if you send email to people who use that service, you may have noticed that the way Gmail filters spam has changed in the past couple of months. Gmail users are seeing many legitimate emails in their spam folders, and senders are finding that people don’t receive their emails. (Here are two Google support threads discussing this.)

It seems that Google has changed the way they handle domains, and is stricter regarding how those domains are configured. If you use your own domain for email, you should check carefully that you have configured the following. This Google support document explains three ways email can be verified. Note that if you have a Gmail account, you may need to make changes as well.

Read the rest of the article on The Mac Security Blog.

How to Stop iCloud Calendar Spam

You thought you had enough spam already, right? You get spam in your email, in Messages, on Twitter and Facebook, and on any other social media app. But now, Mac and iOS users are getting hit with calendar spam. This type of iCloud spam sends you an invitation to an “event,” which informs you of some product you can buy.

You may be familiar with calendar invitations. You can use invitations when telling friends about a party, or informing colleagues about a meeting. You create an event in your calendar, add a number of users’ email addresses, and then click Invite. Through the magic of iCloud, these users get in invitation in their calendar, on their devices.

Spammers have discovered a way to hack the iCloud calendar invitation system. They’ve been sending invitations to tout sales, which probably aren’t legitimate sales, but could be attempts to get people to give up their credit card numbers or personal information, or may lead them to sites where they’ll download malware.

Read the rest of the article on The Mac Security Blog.

How To: Block Spammers in OS X’s Messages App

Every now and then, I get spam in Messages on OS X. I assume that the spammers just try addresses at random; or they may have harvested a bunch of mac.com, me.com, and icloud.com addresses and target them. Lately, I’ve been getting one or more a day.

Messages spam

As you can see above, the spammers send links, hoping you’ll click them. You’ll either end up on pages asking you to log into something, or the web pages could serve malware directly to your Mac.

These are annoying, but it’s easy to block these people to ensure that you don’t get any more messages from them. Right-click on an avatar in the sidebar, and choose Block [username]. This tells Messages to no longer accept messages from that user. You can block users who contact you by sending iMessages, or who send you messages over AIM.