I finally fixed a 3 hour phishing filter issue that should have taken 20 minutes

Last month I was working on setting up email security for a small business in Phoenix. The spam filter kept flagging their legitimate invoices from a vendor. I spent nearly 3 hours digging through white lists and rules before I realized I had the sender domain spelled wrong the whole time. One letter off, and it cost me a whole afternoon. Has anyone else wasted hours on a simple typo like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

beng512h ago

Spell it backwards next time, that's what I started doing after my own three hour typo nightmare. I swear our brains just auto-correct the wrong thing when we're staring at a domain name or IP address for too long. It's like the brain decides it knows what it should say and refuses to see what's actually written down. I had "gmail" as "gmial" once and didn't catch it until I literally read it letter by letter out loud to my coworker. Slowing down and reading things in reverse order has saved me so many headaches since then, it forces your brain to actually process each character instead of guessing.

scott.alex38m agoMost Upvoted

The real mind-bender is when you're reading it backwards and your brain still manages to autocorrect the reversed version too, like it's working on two levels of deception at once.