SPAM

Did you know that there are about 14.5 billion spam messages sent daily around the world?  This means that spam makes up about 45% of all of the email messages sent every day.  While most of the spam that you receive is likely advertising-related messages, some spam comes from more sinister sources who could be attempting to infect your computer with a virus or steal your identity.

You can protect yourself from malicious attackers (and annoying advertisers) by following a few simple steps:

1. Take advantage of your email provider’s spam/junk mail filters.  Email providers such as Hotmail, Gmail provide built-in spam filters that go to work for you as soon as you sign up for an account.  Spam filters don’t catch everything, though, and sometimes they catch the wrong things, so it’s good to make a practice of checking your spam folder occasionally to see if a legitimate email accidentally got caught in the spam filter.  You can also train your spam filter by tagging emails that slipped past the filter as spam.  Just remember not to put too much blame on your email provider’s spam filter for any that slip by because spammers are constantly looking for new ways to make sure that their messages can bypass filters and end up in your inbox.
2. Most email providers also have blacklists that allow you to add email addresses that you know are from spammers (or old boyfriends/girlfriends that you don’t want to talk to anymore).  Check your email provider’s documentation for how to add names to the spam blacklist.
3. Always check the senders email address from any suspect email.  If you receive an email from what appears to be your bank but something doesn’t seem right about it, check the email address to make sure it’s a valid address.  Spammers are tricky, though.  They’ll go to great lengths to make their email addresses look like they’re coming from a legitimate source.
4. Look for typos and misspelled words in the subject line or body of the email.  These are often indicators that the email is spam.  Your bank or your credit card company isn’t going to send you an email that contains errors like these, so if you find things like this, you can be fairly sure it came from a spammer.
5. If you suspect that an email is spam, never follow any links in the email.  They could take you to sites that might start automatic uploads of viruses or other malware.  Instead of clicking the link, go directly to the site that the spammer claims to represent so you know you are going to a legitimate site.
6. Avoid giving spammers your email address by being very careful who you give it to in the first place.  Many sites will sell email addresses that they collect when people sign up for accounts.  Spammers also have applications that scan websites for email addresses.  You can disguise your email address on your personal website, blog, or your company’s website by putting spaces between the local name, the @, and the domain name.  For example: johndoe @ email.com.  Or you could spell out the @ and the period in the domain like this:  johndoe at email dot com.

For more information on protecting yourself from spam, check out the following links:

Forbes.com article:  We Can’t Get Rid of Spam

Spam Laws article:  Spam Statistics and Facts

Article by Uri Raz:  How do Spammers Harvest Email Addresses?