TOPIC:

Please excuse if this topic has been covered before, but I couldn't find it searching on payment, petroleum, phishing, and the recently submitted topics. It looks like, or is supposed to look like, a legitimate company used our club's "Contact Us" to send the email below, without the company knowing who from our club "contacted" their company. (No one did.) Have other clubs recently received an email like ours? I am hesitant to respond to the company without know what, if anything else, the real purpose is.

An internet search on "I understand that we have an invoice outstanding with your company" seems to return only examples of how to write a business email. And "request you for..." reads to me like a non-native speaker of English sent the email.

Thank you. Harry Holland of hopefully non-gassy club 4282.
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Subject:INV 03 2018 Reminder This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
From: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
To: [ultimately, our club's contact person]
Date: Thursday, March 29, 2018, 10:18:48 AM PDT

Hello,
I'm [common English FirstName] from the accounts Payable department at [a petroleum exploration company in OK; we are in CA and never contacted the company]. I understand that we have an invoice outstanding with your company since 08/09/2017 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This email is to request you for a copy of your company controller or a financial manager email contact, so that we can clear payment at the earliest.

First of all, apologies for the delay in payment. The accounts team has been reshuffled and this case came to my notice just an hour ago so I am writing to you immediately.

I'll be waiting to hear from you guys so that I can issue the payment right away. Please reply asap, sincere apologies for the delay.

Thank you!
Sincerely,
[common English FirstName LastName]
Account Controller | Finance
[petroleum exploration company in OK]
T: ...| F: ...
[FirstName LastName's email]

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message, including any attachments, is intended solely for the use of the individual...

Use the email security to block the incoming email address/domain.

We do not restrict the contact and officer individual emails as we don't know who the incoming email is fropm and if your club wants the email.

Thank you for the quick response. Granted, a club can use the FTH-added "Is this spam?" footer to block anything. Issues for me also include the extent and purpose of the recent dodgy email(s), including I suppose the spoofability of any address/domain.

Spam is a fact of life on the internet. We provide the tools for you to be able to manage the incoming spam. You can block email addresses and domain, you can increase the sensitivity of the spamassassin all of these will affect the email that will be received by the FTH email addresses for your officers and contact email addresses.

It is up to you to manage.

I totally agree w/ Brian.

I only wanted to jump in here to mention that we have discussed a number of approaches to this over the past few years that I have been driving development. Originally, the system essentially made all the decisions for clubs, but I was not convinced that a one size fits all approach was working well enough for the wide variety of clubs using the system. (I implemented the blacklist functionality.) Also, Brian was instrumental in getting us using SpamAssassin.

The email security stuff is not perfect, but it is probably the best that we can do while still maintaining reasonable ease of use.

For example, the "Is this Spam?" links that get added now originally were confusing a lot of people and were creating problems with people blacklisting themselves , but I think we have that finally sorted out and working well enough.

Unfortunately, as Brian is alluding to, it is just hard for know what is really spam in some cases... One club's spam is another club's important email. That is why you will have to do some level of management.