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AppSpot Spam Email How I Stopped It

I wrote an article entitled "Stopping AppSpot.com Email Spam" specifically for Outlook.com users that unfortunately turned out incorrect. After a months worth of research and compiling data I believe that I have found a solution. This article outlines the steps that I took and procedures to follow (spoiler alert they aren't complicated).

Using the Outlook.com junk email block list I manually copied every email into an excel sheet. The list totaled 1,184 emails (This took 14 hours to complete). Of that total over 476 originated from the "Appspot.com" domain. This is the Google App platform that is open to developers. The following is a breakdown of the most heavily used prefix's: (meaning Datingnowclub(AT Symbol)appspot.com).

Datingnowclub
Th387292
BlueWorld
Heavy-City
Bjallthebj
Departmentsusa
Heavy-town

After confirming my suspicions with empirical data I then set out to discover everything I could about these email addresses. In my original post I became victim to domain chasing, that is attempting to split the email address into the real domain and then using the block list to prevent what I believed to be the domain name. Hope is not a strategy nor is guessing. This ended in an epic fail. This time I focused purely on the actual domains themselves. Below is a chart that details all the data I could gather about each domain.

While I'll admit I'm not even a rookie in terms of networking, or email traffic three distinct patterns jumped off the page.

All the prefix's were using what appears to be the same table of "Host Names". I later discovered these are Google Mail Relay's specific to SMTP.
All the prefix's were using what appears to be the same table of "Domain Names".
All the prefix's were using the same "IP address".

I dove a little deeper and once I was certain that Google's infrastructure was being used I sent an abuse complaint to Google's support team for Appspot via the following link https://support.google.com/code/contact/cloud_platform_report?hl=en. Then I moved to block it. Here's what I did.

I copied all of the hostnames from the third column and blocked them in Outlook.com by navigating to "Settings >View all Outlook Settings>Junk Email> Clicking the plus symbol. For ease I have included them below:

gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com
alt1.gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com
alt3.gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com
alt4.gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com

Then using the data in the sixth column I copied all of the domain names and blocked them in Outlook.com by using the same method described above. For ease I have included them below:

14.218.217.172.in-addr.arpa
cb-in-f14.1e100.net
dg-in-f14.1e100.net
wa-in-f14.1e100.net
qo-in-f14.1e100.net

I also used one final domain name from the eight column listed below:

14.12.102.66.in-addr.arpa

My results so far have been very promising, I have not seen a single spam email originating from the AppSpot domain, and nor have been magically re-subscribed to any AppSpot subscriptions. Couple quick notes;

I recommend "blocking" the domain names before blocking the subscriptions.
I added the domain names listed above to my firewall.
This method appears to have defeated the block/subscription loop (as shown below). While I'm not certain if it applies to other domains it does appear to have worked with Appspot.com

If you have any feedback or if you can add some real tech speak to this article I welcome it. I know AppSpot spam has been a real issue for alot of people. I hope this helps or at the very least provides some information for someone to improve this solution. If it works for you let the community know!

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Last updated July 3, 2022 Views 9,966 Applies to:

AppSpot Spam Email How I Stopped It

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Discussion Info

Replies (56)