How to Protect an Email Account from SPAM
Ridhars Web
Even a newly created email account will begin to receive spam just
after a few days of it’s creation. Many times we wonder where these
spam come from and why? But this question remains unanswered within
ourselves. So in this post I will try my best to give every possible
information about the spam and will also tell you about how to combat
spam.
What is SPAM?
Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most
broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk
messages indiscriminately. Most widely recognized form of spam is
email spam.
Where do these SPAM come from?
These spam come only from spammers and never from a legitimate user or
a company. These spammers send a single email to hundreds (some times
thousands or millions) of email addresses at a time. They either send
it manually or use spambots to automate the process of spamming.
Why do spammers SPAM?
The main goal of spammers is to send the spam (unsolicited bulk
messages) to as many people as possible in order to make profit. For
example, John builds a small website to sell an ebook which gives
information about weight loss. In order to make sales he needs
publicity for his website. Instead of spending money on advertising,
John decides to create an email which contains information about his
site along with it’s link and send this email to say 100 email
addresses in his contact list. If 1 person out of hundred buy this
book john gets $10. What if he sends this email to 1000s of email
addresses. He gets $100. Imagine, if he sends this email to 1 Million
email addresses he gets $100000.
Now I hope you understood the idea behind spamming. So in order to
make money, spammers send their advertising emails to as many people
as possible without respecting the recipient’s privacy.
From where do SPAMmers get my email address?
On the Internet there exists many sites who collect the email IDs of
people and sell them to spammers in bulk. Most often, people sign up
for monthly newsletters and take up surveys. This is the time where
these scam sites get their email addresses. Also many spammers collect
email addresses by using spambots. These spambots collect email
addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists. Such
spambots are web crawlers that can gather email addresses from Web
sites, newsgroups, forums, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and
chat-room conversations.
Spammers also use the trick of creating Hoax Emails for gathering a
huge list of email IDs. For example, a spammer sends a hoax email
which says “Forward this Message to Help Severely Burned Child”. This
email claims that 11 cents will be donated to the child’s family every
time the message is sent to others. Most of the people believe this
and start forwarding this hoax email to all of the IDs in their
contact list. In this way the email spreads rapidly and eventually
when it reaches the creator (spammer), the spammer gets a huge list of
valid email addresses in the email header. When you get these kind of
hoax emails, you can see for yourself in the email header which
contains a huge list of email addresses of all those people to whom
the email is being forwarded to. This is one of the effective methods
used by spammers to gather email addresses.
Is SPAMming legal?
Spamming is completely illegal. Yet it is really difficult to stop
spammers from spamming since they keep moving from one hosting company
to another after getting banned. This makes it practically impossible
to catch spammers and prosecute them.
How to protect my email account from getting SPAMmed?
The following methods can be used to combat email spam.
1. Use spam filters for your email account. If you’re using email
services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. then spam filters are used by
defaut. Each spam filter has it’s algorithm to detect spam emails and
will automatically move them to SPAM folder. This keeps your inbox
free from spam. However some spam emails become successful to make
their way into the inbox by successfully bypassing the filters.
2. Do not post your email address in public forums, user comments and
chat-rooms. Give your email address only to trustworthy websites while
signing up for newsletters.
3. While taking up online surveys and filling up feedback forms, it is
better not to give your personal email address. Instead singup for a
dummy email account and use this for surveys and feedback forms.
4. While posting your contact email address on your website use this
format: emailaddress [at] yoursite.com instead of
emaila...@yoursite.com. This protects your email address from being
indexed by spambots.
5. Do not respond to hoax messages. When you receive a hoax email,
avoid forwarding it to your friends. Examples of hoax messages can be
found at www.hoax-slayer.com. If you really want to forward it to your
friends, make sure that you use “Bcc” (blind carbon copy) option to
send the email. This will hide all the email IDs to which the mail is
forwarded to.
I hope this helps. Pass your suggestions and feedback via comments.