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Further
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Recycle your inkjet cartridge and help the environment.
Out of the 60 million inkjet cartridges and 44 million toner cartridges used each year in the UK alone, less than 8% are recylced leaving over 95 million of them being thrown away and ending up in landfill sites. Landfill sites...
Computer Hacks – Quacks Looking for Cracks
Who are these people? If they were profiled by the FBI or some law enforcement agency what would the profile look like? What age group would they fall into and what sort of background would they come from? In August of 2003 an 18 year old teen was...
Kate Hepburn Stories
Katherine Hepburn came to Los Angeles in 1932 and like Calista Flockart, had a theater person's snobbish view towards Hollywood. In person, she impressed no one with her looks and style, and executive David O. Selznick worried about her "horse...
No Operating System
Imagine a computer with no operating system. If you can do that, you can imagine a computer that is extremely difficult to hack into. A computer that is almost immune to viruses. A computer that rarely crashes. Too good to be true? No, such a...
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How To Identify Spam
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Written By:
Lewis Leake
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Most of us have opened our email program and found, alongside correspondence from people that we know, offers for products from commercial web sites. Some of these emails we expect. We have asked to be notified of sales and other opportunities or joined a mailing list offered by the company.
Many times, however, the offers are from companies that we have never done business with and may have never even heard of. This is Spam, unsolicited bulk email, and can quickly lead to a massive overload of your inbox.
Identifying Spam as soon as it occurs is the first step to preventing it from happening again. Once your email address is in circulation with these companies, you are well on your way to a very nasty problem. Advertising from legitimate companies is one form. The rest are for illegal services, pornographic material, questionable products, and fraudulent schemes. It is invasive and many times illegal. Spam is the worst form of junk mail and a typical reason why many people have to change their email addresses.
In best cases, the clue can be found in the subject line. If you are offered quick money or a chance to find your long lost high school classmate, you can probably guess that it is Spam.
You may be amazed that, as you read your email, that these companies claim a right to send you this email because you have a relationship with one of their “partners” or “affiliates”. All that this may mean is that they bought your email address from another company with dubious privacy policies. It is still Spam.
Spammers will try to trick you. Unfortunately for us, Spammers only need a response rate, by some estimates, of 0.0001% in order to be profitable. This means that they will use practically any measure to get you to open it before hitting the delete button. You may receive an email from Grandma or one asking for help in the subject line. Before you know it, you are reading their advertisement, if only out of curiosity.
Check the dates and times on any email that you are unsure of. These companies know that many email programs will sort the inbox by the earliest - continued below ...
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continued ...
mail sent. As a result, they place false send dates and times on their Spam hoping that you will open them first.
The worst has to be the ones that seem to come from companies that you know and trust. They may claim to be from your internet service provider in the subject line or have a similar address to that company’s name. It may look like it is from the accounts payable department of a major law firm.
Spammers count on your curiosity and hope that you will respond. Even if you don’t buy anything, they now know that your email address is connected to a live person and, if nothing else, can sell that address to someone else.
Read the To and From fields in any questionable email that you receive. If the To field is empty or filled with an anonymous address, then you have Spam. An anonymous address is typically something like freeoffer@happydays.com.
An address from someone that you do not know through an account at hotmail, yahoo, or msn is probably Spam. These are anonymous, easy to get accounts that spammers use and then discard when they are done. By the time the Service Provider has been made aware that spam is originating from these accounts, the spammer is gone.
Scrambled, random addresses (X12YT853@yahoo.com) from accounts like these are definitely not to be trusted regardless of the content.
Finally, if the email contains a story in which you are asked to do anything to help anyone, check the story out online. There are several great websites like truthorfiction.com that will help you sort through any potential scams or hoaxes perpetuated through email.
These stories can range from silly pranks to dangerous fraud schemes and may need to be reported to the proper authorities before someone, like you, finds their bank account drained.
About the Author
Lewis Leake is the webmaster of eMailCash.com. There you will find articles, resources, books and product reviews on eMail Marketing Strategies and Tactics. You will also find a number of articles on SPAM and how to prevent it. Get Your FREE Mini-Report Spam and It's Consequences!
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Word or DOC files might be the commonest file formats in use right now but Portable Document Format or PDF is the format to use when it comes to distributing and sharing files over the Internet. The reason for this is that PDF uses the...
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