How to Submit a Spam, Ham, or Phishing E-Mail Samples
To make sure that spam, ham, and phishing submissions can be processed as quickly as possible we kindly ask you to follow these guidelines.
Submitting Spam Samples to F-Secure
If you have messages which were incorrectly classified by our spam scanner, we would like to recieve a copy.
- Spam - unsolicited e-mails which were not identified as spam.
- Ham - messages which were incorrectly classified as spam.
- Phishing - messages which attempt to scam you into revealing your bank accounts, credit card numbers, passwords, et cetera. These scams are informally known as "phishing". They also could potentially be classified as spam (they are uninvited, and often sent in large volumes).
Please use these addresses to submit your sample(s):
Please do not create multiple submissions needlessly. If you have a few messages that you want to submit, collect them all into one .zip file and send them as a single submission. (You should of course not mix spam and ham samples in the same submission.)
Do not send messages which are merely unwelcome. Our policy is to accept only messages which are completely unsolicited. You should never sign up for a mailing list and then report it as spam when you no longer want to receive it. Joke messages from friends can be tiresome, too, but they're not spam.
Messages which are more than a few days old are probably not worth reporting to us any longer.
We assume no responsibility for secret information you may send us. If you send a message to us using this channel, our only guarantee is that it will not be released outside of our organization.
Do not send manipulated messages. If you feel you have to edit a message before you can send it to us, please don't send it at all.
Please find submission instructions below.
Formatting Instructions
All submissions should meet the following criteria:
- They should be sent from a valid, live e-mail address. We need to be able to reply to you if we have questions. (Nevertheless, you should not expect any response in the normal case.)
- If you include comments, please write the comments in English only. Messages in other languages may be delayed or even discarded entirely.
- The sample(s) should be attached as a .zip file. The name of the zip file should be samples.zip and it should have no other extra features (internal directory structure, unrelated files, etc). Usually, there is no need to password-protect spam, ham, or phishing sample attachments.
- The sample messages should be stored as individual files in the zip archive.
- Each message/file should be exactly as received by you, with full headers.
There are many good sites with instructions on how to obtain the full headers of an email message. One excellent example is http://helpdesk.rootsweb.com/listadmins/headersfull.html (external link).
If you use Outlook and another e-mail client in parallel, it's probably best to use the alternate client to extract messages for submission.
