Spam, spammers and your email address….What can you do?
Spam is the thing every one of us came across once a time. If not, you have no email address either. If you really do not use the email address, think twice before start to use it. Your email inbox will become a place where the spam gets in permanently.
Spam could not be identified by one word only. Junk mail we get is sometimes easily recognizable due to its subject line. Emails that you cannot label as “suspicious” may be more suspicious than that you think are legal.
It stands to reason, a message from your friend or member of your family, newsletters you did sign up for, and an email from somebody who tries to reach you cannot be recognized as spam. It may appear somebody signs up instead of you and you get newsletters not knowing about the reason of such messages. It’s not a spam but a type of email abuse. Please take into consideration that not every email you get into your inbox is spam.
The fact spam works is evident. People who receive junk mail do purchase the goods advertised there. Spam is cheap and inexpensively to send. The risk to be caught involves dear costs and is substantial enough.
Taking into consideration that the cost is borne by the recipient, spam is a bad thing. It costs resources, time and money turning email into a non-attractive medium. Luckily, email was not destroyed completely due to the spam. Hopefully, it will not do it in future.
A good deal of time and many efforts are spent to manage and delete spam emails. It is annoying to deal with unwanted email. Take care about email address on your website. You might attract the spammers if your email address is hided not properly.
You should not display email addresses in traditional way on your web site if you don’t expect to get spam email. Spam robots harvest email addresses in a very efficient way.
When your email address is stolen by the spammers it will be targeted by them and may even passed or sold to other spammers. These actions are illegal. Spam robots as well as suspicious spammers are hard to detect. Although, the commercial emailers and those who conspire to violate anti-spamming laws can be penalized with imprisonment.
Almost all spammers have their own email address or active website due to which they can be easily tracked down. Spam is an amazing thing that reaches almost everyone online using astonishing and unprecedented efforts.
Spammers use mailing lists with the email addresses only to start sending spam. You are not obliged to provide your email address or to sign up for anything. You start to get spam into your inbox suddenly without any reason and plan.
The interest is caught be the fact how email addresses are discovered by the spammers and how your mailbox is found by them. Such widespread email providers as Yahoo! Mail or Windows Live Hotmail are great source to find addresses to send spam. One common domain name is shared by great many people. Most good and short names are already taken and can be easily discovered with taking into consideration that they all have an already known “hotmail.com” suffix.
It can appear to be very easy to find email address by combining short user name with the domain name. Use sophisticated and long user names if you want to avoid such type of spammers’ attack.
Spammers also use robots that scan following links and web pages to discover email addresses. Working a lot like the search engines’ robots these email address harvesting robots are not interested in page content but in rows with ‘@’ sign and domain name.
Spammers are particularly visit chat rooms, web forums and web-based interfaces due to the fact that a great number of email addresses can be found there. This is the reason to disguise your email address when you use it on the net. One of the ways out is to use disposable email addresses.
Encode your email address when posting it on your own blog or web page. So your visitors will be able to send you an email and see the address as against to spambots. A disposable email address is very effective and appropriate alternative.
Spammers try to send their messages from a distributed network of computers that are not even their own but those of users who do not suspect their computers are used to send spam emails. Spammers do this to avoid filtered and detected.
Spammers cooperate with virus authors to build such a distributed network of spam zombies. Small programs that can send bulk emails are equipped with worms. Moreover, these spam sending engines scan the address book of the user, his files and web cache to find more email addresses. This type of theft of your email address is most difficult to avoid.
The best anybody of us can do is:
– To keep email program patched and updated
– To avoid any unrequested attachments
– Scan your PC with up-to-date and free scanner regularly.
If you get spam into your inbox, don’t answer to the messages even if you want to ask the spammers not to send you spam! If you get something with “unsubscribe” link but did not subscribed to it, don’t click on the link. This is the common way to validate your email address which is followed by more unwanted emails in your inbox. You also can download any virus on your computer clicking on the link.
Never reply to spam messages and never click on links because the spammers do not care about your personal opinion and do their job in spite of the damage they apply to you and your mailbox.
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One Response to “Spam, spammers and your email address….What can you do?”
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Leonard
October 26th, 2012 at 10:52
Nice post which Spammers are particularly visit chat rooms, web forums and web-based interfaces due to the fact that a great number of email addresses can be found there. This is the reason to disguise your email address when you use it on the net. One of the ways out is to use disposable email addresses. Thanks a lot for posting this article.