Growing spam problem

[memnus]

Gmail's spam filter has started to be broken. I've been getting more and more emails purporting to be from my cs.hmc.edu account, originally to that same account, then .forwarded to gmail. Gmail seems to actually believe the from address, even though the headers show it originating elsewhere, and sending it straight to my inbox.

Is this a sign that my CS account is compromised, and I need to worry, or do I just need to start making specific filters?

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Comments

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

Nothing's probably compromised, although if you post one of the emails here with full headers I could probably tell you for sure.

Forwarding defeats some of the spam measures Gmail would be using, though, because one of the important measures is "trust of the sending system", and as far as Gmail can tell, Mudd is the sending system.

[dhalps.livejournal.com]

It's almost certainly HMC accepting fraudulent email, not GMail. You get mail from "yourself" at HMC which then diligently forwards it to GMail, which trusts HMC to tell it about mail that "it" sent.

[miriyam.livejournal.com]

I'm having the same issues. It's got to be HMC accepting the spam and forwarding it.

[macdaddyfrosh.livejournal.com]

It's done this to me since junior year sometime.

Even if gmail is running the filters on the mail forwarded from HMC (which it probably is), the prior probability that mail from you is non-spam is fairly high, so it's a tricky thing to filter.