Spam filtering, scam trends and deliverability, decoded.
Backscatter is the email equivalent of someone using your address as the return label on a pile of junk post. Here is how UK teams can spot phantom bounces, check whether their domain is being borrowed, and tighten controls without blocking genuine delivery failures.
A clean-looking PDF, a harmless square, and a prompt to use your camera: 2026's quishing lures are designed to jump from a filtered inbox to an unfiltered phone. Here's why attachment sandboxes and URL reputation miss the handoff, and what UK tech teams can actually check.
A mailbox rule that quietly copies accounts@ to a personal Gmail address can turn a perfectly legitimate message into an authentication failure. This is how forwarding changes the envelope, breaks SPF alignment and sometimes shreds DKIM — plus a practical audit for every hidden relay in your domain.
Thread hijacking doesn't ask for your trust — it borrows someone else's. We walk through how a compromised mailbox turns an existing payroll thread into a payment diversion, why your filters wave it through, and the four checks that actually break the chain.
Calendar invites can land in your diary without a trip through the usual link-scanning gauntlet. Here’s why .ics files are a favourite for UK phishing in 2026, and how to audit auto-add across Outlook, Google and your phone.
A flood of newsletter signups can be more than annoying — it can be cover for a password reset, invoice or bank alert. Here is how UK recipients, senders and filtering admins can spot a subscription bomb and stop it without making the mess worse.
Spammers love a borrowed return address. When your domain gets picked as the fall guy, the bounces and angry replies land in your lap — here’s how to tell a joe-job from a real delivery problem and what actually helps.
Out-of-office messages are meant to be helpful, but they can also confirm live inboxes, advertise empty desks and generate backscatter that spammers lap up. Here is how UK teams can audit auto-replies, tighten the rules and write safer wording without sounding like a robot.
Send the identical email to BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Outlook.com and Gmail and you'll get six different answers — sometimes six different answers on the same afternoon. We built a repeatable test harness to find out which signals each UK provider actually punishes, and what to do when your campaign works everywhere except one ISP.
The malicious attachment is largely gone. In its place: a tidy PDF invoice with a single link to a 'supplier portal' that exists to harvest credentials and, eventually, redirect payments. Here's how UK finance teams can spot the mismatches, verify bank-detail changes properly and tune filters without burying genuine invoices.
A catch-all domain feels like good manners — no bounced prospects, no awkward 'that address looks wrong' errors. In practice it quietly fattens your list with junk, muddies your reputation and makes incident response guesswork. Here's the audit UK teams can run this week, plus filter rules that keep the genuine catch-all users and bin the rest.
A message can pass SPF, DKIM and DMARC with flying colours and still be a fraud, because that trio only proves a domain is authorised to send — not who typed the name on the front. Here's why display-name spoofing keeps landing in UK inboxes, and the habits that close the gap.
The quietest segment on your UK mailing list is often the one doing the most damage. Spam traps never bounce, never reply and never unsubscribe — they just sit there while your sender reputation slides. Here's how to find them, and what to do when you do.
Lookalike .uk domains are no longer a niche phishing trick — they are a core part of UK invoice fraud and fake login pages. Here is how to spot the pattern, read the registration clues, and write filters that catch doppelgangers without punishing legitimate British senders.
Opted-in does not automatically mean wanted. Between aggressive retargeting, tired consent and newsletters nobody remembers signing up for, grey mail is teaching UK users to swipe first and think later — and that has consequences for deliverability teams.
‘Just click unsubscribe’ is becoming bad advice for suspicious email. In 2026, fake opt-out pages, List-Unsubscribe header tricks and reply-to traps are all designed to turn a routine click into a credential harvest or a confirmed live inbox.
A brand-new UK inbox, 40 sign-ups for samples, discounts and competitions, and three months of watching the junk folder swell. Here is the week-by-week spam timeline — plus the rules I would use before handing over an email address for a freebie.
Parcel smishing has grown up. The 2026 wave borrows real courier branding, freshly registered lookalike domains and clever timing around peak season — and it sails straight past filters trained on old-school spam. Here's the anatomy of the con, plus the rules and reporting routes that actually help UK users.
Most UK small-business newsletters don't land in spam because subscribers dislike them. They land there because the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records don't line up, and the receiving filter never got as far as the content. Here's a practical 2026 audit you can run in an afternoon.