Gruffermail pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, bothering and annoying you. Still, they are much more than simple pop-up ads – their essence is clearly malicious, and they can introduce other malware to your computer. In this article, I will show you how to remove Gruffermail pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Gruffermail push notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise fake shopping sites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.
What are Gruffermail pop-up advertisements?
As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular pop-up advertisements and Gruffermail notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – notify you about the latest publications, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.
Brief description of the Gruffermail.com pop-up ads:
| Name | Gruffermail.com |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
| IP Address | 104.21.42.166 |
| Malware type | Adware1 |
| Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
| Hazard level | Medium |
| Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
| Similar behavior | Larens, Tisens, Cfrsoft |
| Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Gruffermail pop-up advertisements, in contrast, are related to less legit sites. You will generally witness the offer to turn them on after a redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless it throws you into such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-ups is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS filtering. In other cases, the websites may refuse to show you the content unless you enable these pop-up advertisements. These requirements should be the red flag, as sites generally have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Seeing such an requirement should be the reason to skip the site right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.
Gruffermail push notification.
How does this work?
The majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they like. It can be an advertisement of the product listed on this site, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.
Cybercriminals rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of banners of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no image-caring companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Gruffermail popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same victim can be trapped by several pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.
The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable payment for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite most of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the parties a lot of profit.
Are Gruffermail pop-up notifications dangerous?
Yes, they are. Initially, they can look harmless – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up notifications. Gruffermail.com website is ruled by crooks, who intentionally show hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these pop-up notifications carry.
As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Gruffermail push notifications lack legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the website these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-up ads promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, Gruffermail pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Gruffermail pop-ups?
Fortunately, Gruffermail pop-ups removal is pretty easy. They reside in the browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I told above, some pop-up notifications may introduce malicious software to your computer. It is hard to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Therefore, after disabling the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up ads, and they still appeared. This situation can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.
Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires more time to complete and can be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.
Reset your browsers with GridinSoft Anti-Malware
To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.
You may see the list of options for each browser. By default, they are set up in a manner that fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.
The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because the latter is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.
Reset your browsers manually
Manual method of browser reset
To reset Edge, do the following steps:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original:
For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default:
Opera can be reset in the next way
- Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option:
- After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown:
When the browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the website you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines2:
# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handle within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.
Scan your system for possible viruses
After removing the Gruffermail push notifications, it’s time to see if these pop-ups brought any threat to your system. Launch GridinSoft Anti-Malware, and then click on Standard scan. It will be enough in most cases to find and remove malware. The scan will last 5-10 minutes; you are free to use your system during that process.
Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).
How to Remove Gruffermail Pop-ups?
Name: Gruffermail
Description: Gruffermail - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Gruffermail.com push notifications?” or “why do Gruffermail.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Gruffermail pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.
Operating System: Windows
Application Category: Adware
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.
