How to prevent Spam E-mails
If you are having an E-mail id then you might be spending lots of time on deleting and blocking spam massages from your inbox every day. Fighting against spam E-mails is a never-ending process and the best is to prevent spam from reaching your inbox. Spam emails are unwelcome commercial email sent without consent. It is email that you don’t want and didn’t ask for, and its content can cause embarrassment and distress.
But one should remember that the sender generally doesn’t target spam emails personally. The same spam email can be sent to millions people at a time and the addresses are often guessed. Some spammers buy lists, some search websites and harvest email addresses or abuse facilities in your web browser. Others simply use specific software to generate or guess email addresses based on dictionaries of common words and terms.
Spammers use software?s like ?spiders? or ?email harvesters? which crawl into websites and find out anything which is written before and after the sign ?@?.This way they can collect a lot of emails. But the software that spammers use today, are smart enough to detect this as well. Another method of confirming valid email addresses is sending HTML in the E-mail’s body, and embedding an image.
Guessing could be done based on the fact that email addresses are based on people’s name. Spammers sometimes guess email addresses and send a test message to those ids. Then they wait for either a confirmation or an error message to return by email, indicating the status of the ids. A confirmation could be obtained by inserting mail headers requesting the delivery system or mail client to send a confirmation of delivery or reading.
Reporting and investigating spam e-mails incidents is complicated as some spammers employ hackers to hide their true identity. But preventing such spam e-mails is possible if you take some personal measures are as follows :
1. Always use Junk email filters if possible since some of them are free to use and any message that is caught by the filter is moved to a special Junk E-mail folder, where you can retrieve or review it at a later time.
2. Do not click on links provided in the spam emails because this informs them that your email address is valid and you will only end up on more spam lists. Use a spam email filter on your computer. Check privacy policies and marketing opt-outs carefully.
3. While filling out online forms read the entire form before clicking ?Submit?. Doing so will help ensure that your email address will not be sold to other websites. When left at their default values, the check boxes on these forms authorize spam.
4. As it is free to sign up for an email account so it is better to sign up for multiple accounts and set up a private account for emailing to friends and family. Use a separate account for all other online activities to help prevent spam from arriving in your private inbox.
5. Use a unique email id address as it is easy to guess is guaranteed a lot more spam than a unique address will receive. And never share your email address with anyone you do not trust.
6. Don?t give your email address in chat window and don?t respond to any suspicious chat windows which pop out with a link listed inside.
7. When you buy things online, companies sometimes add a check box which is already selected to indicate that it is fine to sell or give your e-mail address to other businesses. Clear the check box so that your e-mail address won’t be shared.
8. Free anti spam software can help you from spam-mails. This software removed immediately unasked large quantities of e-Mail, so that your Inbox are free from this kind of junk mail.
9. Encoding your email address into special values called character entities which represent each character is one method.
10. Preview messages received before opening them. Many email clients has a preview mode to give you a peek of the email content before actually opening them.
11. Use an internet browser with built-in security system such as Mozilla Firefox that prevents malicious codes from being installed in your computer without your knowledge. This malicious codes do keyword logging and send email address, passwords, and even bank IDs to the programmer who came up with the code.