Low Severity

Message content: Request for author engagement

Description

Detects inbound messages containing language consistent with unsolicited book/author related scam from a free email provider. Often used to ask for payment related to promotion of an upcoming or recently published book.

References

No references.

Sublime Security
Created Jul 24th, 2026 • Last updated Jul 24th, 2026
Source
type.inbound
// freemailer
and sender.email.domain.root_domain in $free_email_providers
// goodreads mention
and strings.icontains(body.current_thread.text, "goodreads")
// addresses the recipient as the author of their own work
and regex.icontains(body.current_thread.text,
                    '\byour (?:books?|work|text|title|novel|manuscript|writing|scholarship|research|reporting|story)\b'
)
//
and regex.icontains(body.current_thread.text,
                    '\b(?:featur|spotlight|showcase|introduce your|invite you|selected your|reading (?:cycle|circle|challenge|community|discussion))'
)
// negate highly trusted sender domains unless they fail DMARC authentication
and not (
  sender.email.domain.root_domain in $high_trust_sender_root_domains
  and coalesce(headers.auth_summary.dmarc.pass, false)
)
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