The Art of Mail Filtering 3.0

Some mails are good, some bad.

The Incident

While I was looking through my emails, I briefly scanned them. This one contained commercial stuff and I put it into the waste bin. Another one promised health benefits and it ended at the same spot. One mail contained a notification of a package delivery.

I went through my short list of checks. The mail looked familiar.  I recognised the fonts and the lay out. Then I read some parts of the mail. The language was flawless. Dutch is not an easy language to learn. I took a good look to the email address. It had a domain of a respectful package delivery service.

There was one thing wrong with this mail. I had not ordered anything. So, I did not click on the track and trace link. This might load some malware on my computer. Then I decided to park this mail in another folder for later action.

The Debrief

That very evening, I had a talk with my wife. After talking about the daily subjects, I told her about this strange notification mail of a package delivery. Then I got a surprising answer:
“I ordered something and I did not hear anything about it.”

The Sting

Of course, I knew that my wife has some good skills like baking bread. But baking is different from hacking. At that moment I had not even time to think along these lines, because she added:
“I used my email address.”

This answer triggered my thought process. She had ordered something at my favourite online shop. Then the shop had to send mails about package delivery to my wife. There was already an account on her home address and that was my account.

The mails were sent to the emails address of my account. This way I got a suspicious mail.

The Story

My wife was searching for a gift and found it in my favourite shop. She wanted to surprise me and wanted to have it delivered, when I was from home. This way, the surprise would be big. There was one thing she could not have predicted, and that was the actual email address, which would be used.

The Hot Fix

During our talk, my wife figured out a solution for this problem:
“The next time, I sent it to my friend.”