Today, almost everyone has their email accounts that become part of their identity. Not having an email account can be a handicap in interacting with others. Because email is the cheapest, fastest, and most effective means of communication, individuals and organizations even form a part of official records. Emails help communicate with the recipients directly and engage in valuable conversations anytime, which become a permanent record even if deleted later, provided you retain a printout of the chat.
However, the downsides of email are pretty concerning because all email accounts are highly susceptible to spam and malicious emails that keep on flooding the inboxes. Emails sent from unknown or queer addresses keep flooding the inboxes, and you cannot stop most of these unsolicited messages barring a few that the email service provider can identify as spam and direct it to the spam folder. Otherwise, you have to scrutinize such unwanted email and manually send it to the spam folder. Once you identify a spam sender, the system will take care of messages sent from this address in the future and automatically direct them to the spam folder.
The broad spectrum of spam
Soon upon creating an email address, you start using it for various purposes. Soon, the address becomes known to numerous people, including those with whom you did not have any interaction or communication. Spams are highly annoying because it creates too much distraction and to maintain a spam-free inbox you must invest a lot of time every day to clear the clutter, and your work suffers. Spams can encompass anything and everything from asking for monetary donations, helping you shed a few kilos, promising some big prize money that you won without ever subscribing to any scheme or buying lottery tickets, and even more stupid things like sex boosting pills and techniques. Spams can range from innocuous to obnoxious and offensive, but there is hardly any way to stop it from reaching your inbox.
How do spammers get your email address?
Spammers deploy various techniques to collect people’s personal information, all of which are unscrupulous and with some bad intentions. Spammers usually lure people into clicking on some links or open attachments with some false promise with the hope of accessing the responder’s personal information as soon as someone clicks on it. Some others create fake websites and request people to subscribe to them by sharing their email addresses. There is a huge market for selling email addresses, and spammers can purchase email addresses legally or illegally. Creating accounts of various websites is another pitfall, as your email address can fall into the wrong hands. Spammers collect email addresses by various other means, some of which are pretty sophisticated.
Beware of phishing
Although most spam emails are pretty recognizable from the subject line, content, and the sender’s address, which are often irrelevant and quite weird, smarter players deploy smarter techniques like phishing to dupe people. You might receive a purportedly genuine email that appears to have come from some legitimate entity, and the sender uses some trick to gain your trust and compel you to share some of your personal information in good faith. As a result, you might share your personal information, including your bank details, on a fake website and invite immense problems. This technique, known as phishing, is still one of the most potent weapons used by spammers.
Protect your email address
The more you share your email address more vulnerable it becomes and falls prey to spammers. Therefore, to protect your email address, you must be careful in exchanging it with trusted entities only, especially for private or official communication. Be cautious about sharing your email by marking copies of communication to many others as might be deemed necessary. But still, there is no guarantee that the actions will shield your email address from the prying eyes of spammers and hackers. However, it will indeed reduce the chances of misuse of your email address significantly.
Seek added protection
For added protection of your email address linked to your identity, you must be wise to deal with suspicious or unknown entities by sharing a disposable email address with them. These email addresses are temporary and valid for any period from a few days to a year according to your choice or as per the company’s policy issuing the email address. For example, if you are registering with a new website about which you do not have much information, use a temporary email address that you can readily obtain from some company to stay on the safe side. Such addresses do not link to your data; hence there is no fear of any harm.
Just log in to the company’s website that provides the temporary email address and copy the email address from the box for using it on websites about which you might have reservations in sharing your actual email address.