Yesterday I got an unusual email spam. It hit my inbox on Fastmail, coming from my Google account. The spam link was embedded in the actual email address, using the plus notation that Gmail supports. On Fastmail, the link wasn’t clickable, but on Gmail it was. When I checked Gmail, the email had been moved into Spam, so I guess they were dealing with many copies of this. Surprisingly, the link is still clickable, even with the email in the Spam folder.
I thought I hadn’t received spam like this before but looking at it again, I think I did. Just once.
The email came from “Google <noreply@google.com>”, and the spammers used some online service that requires verification. They stuffed the spam link into the email address. Here’s what it looks like on Gmail:
![A spam email I received. I have obscured the spam link in this ALT text:
Verify this email is yours
[my email]+~New~messages~Read-[spam link]#@
googlemail.com
This email address was recently entered to verify your email address.
You can use this code to verify that this email belongs to you.
793352
If this wasn't you, someone may have mistyped their email address. Keep this code to yourself, and no other action is needed at this moment.
The Google Accounts team](https://odd.blog/files/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-09-at-22.45.56.jpg)
They added a “#” character at the end of the link, so the @googlemail.com part of the email would become an anchor tag. Pretty clever, pretty devious. The link goes to a 404 now, but had an image with a link yesterday.
So, be careful if you get any email verification emails. Especially if you weren’t expecting it. It’s probably spam.
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