Unwanted commercial emails, messages, and robocalls – better known as spam – are at best a nuisance.
You may not be able to stop every single spam message from reaching your inbox, but you may be able to reduce the amount you get. It can cost you money in various ways:
- Identity Fraud: It’s not always your cash spammers, but your personal information. Thieves can use your account number or your Social Security number to steal your identity.
- Misplaced Messages: When your email inbox is clogged with spam, it’s easy for real messages to get lost.
- E-Mail Scams: These same spam offers aren’t just bad deals – they’re totally fake. several spam messages are e-mail scams intended to get you off your money.
- Malware: Some criminals use spam to sneak harmful code, known as malware, into your computer. Malware types entail viruses, worms, spyware, and adware. Once computer hackers have their malware in place, they can use it to steal information and financial information from them.
- Sales Pitches: The whole point of spam is to sell you things—usually things you don’t need or want. But occasionally, a message might slip through that looks like a good deal you’re going to decide to snap it up.
- Wasted Time: Spam can cost you dearly even if you don’t click it. You still have to spend time erasing it, and just as the old adage goes, time is money.
Here are a couple of clues to help you identify spam messages easily to make it easier for you to delete them:
- Unfamiliar address.
Check the e-mail address along with the sender’s name. If it has a lot of numbers in it, it’s often a sign that it’s a fake email address created for spam purposes.
- Lots of Typos.
If almost every word is misspelled, it’s a red flag. Spammers often spell words wrong on purpose in an attempt to filter spam filters. Common trick is to insert numbers instead of letters.
- Unknown Sender
Some spam mails are “spoofed,” which means that their headers are changed to hide the sender’s identity. For example, some spam e-mails appear to come from large companies, such as Amazon or Citibank.
- Fake Links
In seeing fake links in an e-mail, hover your cursor over the link to see what the URL is. If the link says it’s for the PayPal site, but the domain in the URL isn’t “paypal.com,” it’s almost certainly a fake.
- Unidentified attachments.
The easiest way for hackers to get malware on your computer is to get you to install it on your own. They send you an e-mail attachment, and when you open it, it will infect your computer.
- Request for Personal Data
They will try to entice you to hand over your username, password, bank account number, credit card number, or social security number. You can use all this information to steal your identity.
- Suspected subject matter
Many of them involve money in one form or another: sales, investment opportunities, loan offers, cash requests, sex and dating, new health treatments, “free gifts” and package information that you don’t recognize to order.
- Pictures Instead of text.
Another way spammer avoid spam filters is by using images instead of text. Often, a large image takes up most of the body of the message. It usually has large, eye-catching prints inside it.
Some tips on how to stop spam emails and how to reduce your exposure to spam.
- Train the spam filter
If you get a spam email from an unknown sender, don’t just delete it. Select it, and then mark it as a spam message. Sometimes an important email from a known sender may be marked as spam by your email client. In such scenarios, you need to mark that email as safe to train your false positive email client.
- Never respond to spam
If you received a spam email and recognized it before you opened it, don’t open it. If you realize that email is spam only after you open it, mark it as spam and close it. Don’t click links or buttons, or download files from spam messages.
- Use a third-party Anti-spam filter
Most of the anti-spam solutions that are available today can be customized according to your needs, allowing only approved emails to be sent to your inbox. There is free anti-spam software as well as paid anti-spam software.
- Please hide your email address
The more people you expose your email address, the more spam emails you get. So, keep your e-mail address hidden from the public view. Do not publish your primary email address on the web unless it is required.
- Use alternative e-mail addresses
By buying a product or subscribing to a company mailing list, you are automatically signed up to receive unwanted marketing updates from that company or may share your contact details with a third-party advertising firm.
