How To: Deal with SPAM and Phishing Emails
- Admin
- Jun 13, 2017
- 2 min read
When users receive 'spam', phishing, etc. emails, it is important to have a basic game plan in place on how to deal with this type of email. It is very likely you won’t end up doing this with every spam or phishing email in your district, especially if you are a jack-of-all-trades tech support guru, but sometimes you also want to feel like you are doing something more. Having a quick process to give to users on how they can help you may be of benefit.
There is information in the original email internet header that can’t be pulled from forwarded versions; just another reason for users NOT to forward a potentially dangerous email to you as-is. While Outlook is not the only email client that uses internet headers, it is the client we will use to illustrate the process.
If you are confident the email is safe, the process of gathering the internet headers is very simple in Outlook 2016:
Open Outlook 2016.
Open the message in its own window. (So basically, double-click it)
On the File tab, select Properties.
Header information appears in the Internet headers box. Right-click in the box and choose “Select All” then right-click again and select “Copy”
If you want to get to the internet header information without opening the email, you can do it with just a few more steps.
1. Select File-->Options
2. Select the Quick Access Toolbar on the left.
3. Under the “Choose commands from” dropdown list, select “Commands Not in the Ribbon”
4. From the command list select “Message Options…”
5. Press the “Add>>” button
The option is now on the Quick Access Toolbar and you can view the Internet headers of a message without needing to open it first. You can also use shortcut keys to access it. To see what those are, press down the Alt key and hold it.
You will see the key you need to press along with “Alt” to access Message Options with a shortcut.
Now that you have this information, there is a lot you can do with it.
You can analyze it:
With Microsoft: https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/MHA/Pages/mha.aspx
You can then grab the sender information and pass on the email to the appropriate establishment based on the situation. These could include Microsoft Phishing Reporting (phish@office365.microsoft.com), the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) (https://www.ic3.gov/complaint/default.aspx/), or the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Online Fraud Detection and Prevention (OFDP) team (phishing@irs.gov )…in addition to whatever may be specific to your situation.
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