Paypal emails going to 'delete' folder

DougAxford · #1 04-07-2008, 04:14 PM

This is weird. In the past week, all of our Paypal payment notifications are going directly to my 'deleted' folder. I have removed all filters that even come close, leaving only the viagra, breast & other enhancement spam. I'm down to 4 block rules that would have nothing remotely to do with Paypal. This just started last week. Nothing changed on isp that I know of.

Any suggestions? other than carefully going through 'deleted' 5 times a day?

DierkHaasis · #2 04-08-2008, 03:25 AM

Do you have other anti-spam measures than manual filters implemented? Could it be a spam score aded by your [or any other] ISP, which is evaluated behind the scenes by an anti-spam filter or a firewall/Internet security program?

PayPal and eBay, due to the misuse by spammers, are notoriously filtered out by anti-spam programs, particularly heuristic and statistical ones [e.g. Bayes analysis].

Which e-mail program do you use, which Internet security program [anti-virus, firewall, anti-spam], how are security measures implemented on your ISP's side, who is you your network provider?

DougAxford · #3 04-08-2008, 11:41 AM

Thanks Dierk, I'm on OE for mail and Firefox for web, nod32 for security. Problem is that nothing changed on my end so I am going to call isp & Paypal today & ask. Problem is that everything was fine one week ago then went wrong. I've removed all message rules and it still is happening.

I spent a few hours on this and it's getting frustrating.

DougAxford · #4 04-08-2008, 12:09 PM

I spoke to my isp and they told me what i expected. Anything that they send to me that gets through their spam filter is my problem, it's impossible for them to designate which folder an email will go to - it's either sent or not. It must be something on my computer - but what??

Dennis_Vied · #5 04-08-2008, 01:17 PM

I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what's going on. My Spam filter puts suspected Spam into a holding folder to be checked by me later. Only after I review it is it put into the Delete folder. I don't understand a program that puts e-mail directly into a Delete folder.

Most PayPal and E-Bay mail I get goes into the Spam holding folder, and it is usually Spam in fact, so it eventually gets deleted. I don't usually get legitimate PayPal e-mail unless I ask for it. It's the same with E-Bay. So it might be comforting to know that most of the e-mail probably is Spam and should be deleted, but still I wouldn't want it deleted until I deleted it.

DierkHaasis · #6 04-09-2008, 02:17 AM

If you use a designated spam folder - the preferred and default method - or put directly into the trash folder is a matter of settings. IIRC, OE does not come with a built-in anti-spam feature but almost every solution on the market plugs into OE/OL.

NOD32, AFAIK, uses a combination of several methods to detect spam. One of them is a [public] blacklist, another is Bayes analysis. Both can go wrong. A blacklist is only so good as the maintainers are, if they get a domain wrong, e.g. put a legitimate eBay/PayPal domain on it, every program using the list will come up with false positives.

Bayes is even more fickle since it is a statistical analysis, which relies on the input the user gives. Mark a rightful message as spam and legitimate mail will end up marked as spam. That is actually the most common reason for false positives with automatic spam detection. It is vital to mark a false positive as 'not spam' to ensure Bayes analysis to work correctly. My guess is, you inadvertently marked a rightful e-mail as spam, botching your statistics.

It could also be PayPal changed their e-mail headers or body contents, now containing enough triggers to give their messages a high spam value. Bayes analysis assigns a value to messages, which can be used to set a limit up to which a message is considered as not spam [i.e. 70 out of 100 points needed to be considered spam]; especially helpful if you use several Bayes-based anti-spam measures.

Hopefully this helps you to find what's to be set, look if you have marked the wrong message as spam, look into NOD32's settings/options to see if something has been changed by accident.

Noel_Carboni · #7 04-09-2008, 05:11 AM

I don't use Outlook Express, so I can't speak to why it would file your PayPal eMails as you have described... Are you sure OE doesn't download the messages from the different folders on the ISP's system? In other words, could they be filing them in your Deleted folder on the server, then OE brings them into the Deleted folder on your PC?

I can say this: Mine are getting through okay, and still triggering the rules I have defined, so PayPal's format must not have changed too much.

-Noel

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