How to block "via" senders in Gmail

Question

I have this annoying problem in Gmail. Spammers are by-passing the Gmail spam filters and are so clever that I am not able to create a manual filter of my own to block them. They are sending me junk mails from e-mail IDs of the form:

[email protected] via watchstore.cleanmail.in

[email protected] via watchstore.cleanmail.in

In general,

[email protected] via watchstore.cleanmail.in

Now, I cant set a filter for each and every mail as they are from different IDs. The common part is the via address which is watchstore.cleanmail.in. But when I try creating a filter with watchstore.cleanmail.in in From field, Gmail doesn't list these emails. In short, the filter is not able to detect via addresses.

Report Spam/Unsubscribe options aren't working.

How can I get rid of these annoying spammers?

Answer 1

The reason Gmail's built-in filters won't work in this situation is because they can't be applied to the "X-Forwarded-For" header. That header is where the "via" domain info is stored.

My solution was to use a Google Apps Script to check my inbox every few minutes and automatically filter out messages sent via a specific domain. It actually works really well. Since implementing the script, I haven't had to deal with this type of spam at all. You can read my full walkthrough here: http://www.geektron.com/2014/01/how-to-filter-gmail-using-email-headers-and-stop-via-spam/

Answer 2

You can filter "via" emails with this configuration:

Has the words    replyto:@domain-to-filter.com

Answer 3

I have heard from a friend of mine that there is a Chrome extension that can block an email address or even the entire domain all in just one click. I haven't tried it yet but I hope this helps. Here is the link: Block Sender

Answer 4

I made a similar script, it checks for "Received From:", you can add as many domains as necessary in the domains variable.

//without http:// etc, just domain-name.com or domainname.com ....
var domains = [
  'secureserver.net',
];

  //This is not the best solution, a better solution would be to add a filter like this for example => From: #domainname.com
  //and then this app would read your GMail filters and test whether it begins with # to apply the next function if so.. but I couldn't find a way to read GMail settings from here

function filterVia() {
  // get all threads in inbox
  var threads = GmailApp.getInboxThreads();

  for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
    Utilities.sleep(100);
    // get all messages in a given thread
    var messages = threads[i].getMessages();
    // iterate over each message
    for (var j = 0; j < messages.length; j++) {
      // log message subject
      var content = messages[j].getRawContent();

      for (var k = 0; k < domains.length; k++) {
        //make domain name as regexp
        var re = new RegExp('\\.|\\-', 'gi');
        var b = domains[k].replace(re, '\\$&');
        var regex = new RegExp("Received\: from .*" + b,'gim');
        var does_match = regex.test(content);

        if(does_match){
          //MARK AS READ (maybe spares you an unnecessary notification)
          messages[j].markRead();
          //DELETE THE MESSAGE
          messages[j].moveToTrash();          
        }

      }
    }
  }
}

Answer 5

If anyone ends up here looking for a way to filter received emails by a label and save them to the label's folder instead of marking them as spam and trashing them, here's a script doing just that (Edited the one provided by @ChrisZ).

function filterByVia() {
  var threads = GmailApp.getInboxThreads(0, 5);
  var label = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName("yourlabel");
  for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
    var messages=threads[i].getMessages();
    for (var j = 0; j < messages.length; j++) {
      var message=messages[j];
      var body=message.getRawContent();
      if (body.indexOf("the domain after via") > -1) {
        label.addToThread(threads[i]);
      }
      Utilities.sleep(1000);
    }

   }
 }

Hope it helps someone some day

Answer 6

It has taken some work, but the answer turns out to be rather simple:

• In each email there is a header that carries the website of the "via" sender.
• In the email, upper right, click the three vertical dots, and choose "show original" and it should pop up in a new tab. It's the coded version of the email with headers.
• Scroll down and search for the line that has: "dkim=pass header.i=@(website.com)"
• Copy this bit
• Then in the actual email (original window), click the three vertical dots again, and choose "filter messages like this"
• In the pop-up window, go to line "has the words" and there paste what you just copied.
• Also, remove anything from the "from" line.
• Click "create filter" at the bottom of the window.
• Check the box "delete it" and "create filter" again.

Ta-dah! That does it.

Answer 7

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

http://mashable.com/2012/06/22/gmail-filters/

My suggestion is try creating filters.