Identifying SPAM
by: Anthony Peters
Just about everyone today wakes to find their inbox full of unwanted communication. This puts a lot of workload on a professional to delete these and not to mention important mails lost due to overflowing junk mails. Normal content of these emails would be to sell something or the other to you, irrespective of whether you need it or not and from unknown companies that may or may not exist. Normal trend says that SPAM is mostly concerning adult products, pharmaceuticals, free money, diets and get-rich-quick schemes and of course scams like the famous African asking for help to share an unforeseen fortune of a few million dollars left with their bank unclaimed.
The latest in SPAM is a process called ?phishing?, where you may receive authentic looking emails from Pay Pal, eBay or even Citibank, asking you to click on a link and login using your login name, password, account number and even pin. This information is then forwarded to ?Russian Mafia? as the rumor goes that may use the information to take funds off from your Pay Pal account of transfer funds from your bank or to use your credit card information at a later date to make purchase you don't even know about, but end up paying for.
Recognizing SPAM email is the first step towards preventing them. Mostly you can do this by

The senders name, if you do not recognize it.
Subject that concerns gambling, pornography or just undecipherable line of numbers or characters.

Most spammers use similar mails of Banks, credit card companies, Pay Pal or eBay to induce you into a response. In many cases they send mails as a response to an email which you have never sent and in some cases the email looks as though it has bounced back from the receiver after you have sent it.
Always read the address fields - to and from. In case you find strange addresses similar to yours or anonymous and scrambled alpha numeric characters, you have SPAM. SPAM leads to a scam and the only objective here is to part you with your hard earned money.
How to get rid of spam? The objective of SPAM email to get you to open the email and then seduce you with the mouth watering offers contained in it. Once you fall for it, you are a goner. SPAM is at best known to be a billion dollar industry, imagine the success rate of a spammer when he sends out millions of mails, if he gets even a success rate of 0.001% he could be a millionaire in no time. The mother of all troubles here is ?money? and a spammer thinks that you are fool enough to part with yours to make him rich.
Changing you email address does not help much since, all mail addresses get spammed one day or the other. Now-a-days it is much quicker than you can imagine. Using a SPAM blocker or a email address protected by SPAM blocker is the only option. One such successful product today is the Inboxdiet which challenges spammers to get a mail through to your inbox. This works with all email clients and has been tested to be very effective in neutralizing all forms of SPAM.




Want to protect your inbox from spam, phishing and virus emails?

IT'S FREE - SIGN UP NOW!