Windows 7: Mail wrongly marked as phishing

I'm sure this problem must have been covered before, but several searches of the forum have not thrown any relevant threads up. I'm sorry if I've missed them.



I have just bought a new pc with Windows 7 after many years with XP. I'm really missing Outlook Express but trying to find my way around Windows Live Mail.

The most frustrating thing is emails from a person on my contact list, who I've also added to the safe sender list, keep being flagged as phishing. Every time I have to unblock it on the pink bar at the top of the email, then move it to the appropriate folder, even though I have a message rule to filter it to the correct folder. I get a lot of mail from this person - 14 already today! Is there any way I can stop their emails being blocked?

Give Gmail a try instead its a very good alternative.

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin

Thanks for the suggestion, stve. I'll look into Gmail.

My guess is there is a difference between Junk Mail (safe or blocked senders) and phishing. Just because you say the sender is "safe" doesn't mean there isn't a phishing link in the mail. But that is only a guess. One thing you should do for sure if you are using the 2011 version is a repair install of Windows Live Essentials via Programs and Features. That is supposed to fix a bug in WLM 2011 with respect to Junk mail filtering.

Thanks for the tip. I've repaired Windows Live Essentials as suggested.

I get your point about the difference between junk mail and phishing, but it seems strange that every email from this person is treated as phishing whether it contains a link or not - or at least I think it is. I'll pay particular attention to the content of the mail when/if it happens again, and post more details, if that's OK.

I would contact this person and ask if he has any protection on his computer. It may be his computer is infected and when he sends email it may have some phishing that he doesn't know about. That may be your answer as your computer is doing just what it suppose to do.

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the suggestion, but he's pretty computer savvy so I'd be surprised if that was the problem - although having said that he does use a Mac!

I asked him to send a simple email after I'd done the repair and that came through OK, so I'll wait and see what happens.

Thanks again for everyone's advice.

Sorry to drag this up again, but I've noticed that, in the emails treated as phishing, the headers of at least one of the quoted messages have the email addresses shown again with "x-msg://30/" (with various numbers, not always 30) at the beginning.

I think it must be caused by the sender, as these are 3-way conversations and, even when quoting messages that contain these extra versions of the email addresses, the third person's mail is not treated as phishing.

It isn't a problem, as I've got used to unblocking his mail and dragging it to the appropriate folder, I'm just curious as to why it's happening.

Sounds werd to have that in the email address unless it was coming from some high level security server. Is it possible that it is coming thru a US government location?

Thanks for the suggestion, IggyAZ, but I should have said that I'm in the UK (I've now changed my profile to show that), so the emails wouldn't be coming through a US government location, and I don't think they could be coming through a UK one either. They are usually sent in the evening from home from his own domain.

Don't worry about it, everyone. I just thought the prefix added to the email addresses might ring a bell with someone. I'll just carry on unlocking and dragging his mail!

Thanks again for all the advice offered.