The email population is getting bigger as many people are getting or subscribing to an email account or accounts everyday. Also, there are several email providers today that allows people to create an email account with them for free. Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and AOL are among them.
This is also the main reason why hackers and spammers are targeting emails since hundreds of millions of people are using emails. Therefore, with this great number of emails out there, the more email addresses that the hacker can scrape the web and collect, the bigger is his chances of sending out advertising emails or even viruses and malwares.
Avoiding email scam
The very first way to avoid an email scam is by first detecting it. Do not and never engage in an email communication when at first you doubt the authenticity of the sender or the idea or subject matter in the email message. Here are some of the email scam subjects that many people fall into believing:
- They won a great sum of money from some lottery and they are being contacted to get information how they claim their winnings. But in doing so, they need to pay for some fees and processing charges before they receive their winnings. That makes it a scam.
- They are a qualified heir or a wealthy person who died and willed some of the dead person’s wealth to them. But in order to get their inherited wealth, then need to pay for documentation and lawyer charges and then the willed wealth be released to them. That makes it a scam.
- They are contacted by a lady from Ghana or Nigeria or some other countries in the world. Through constant email communication, feelings of love and compassion is developed and then the lady then asks for financial help to go to the victim’s country. Fees for passport processing, visas and plane ticket will then be asked by the girl so that she will travel to the man’s place for good. That makes it the worst scam ever that fooled a lot of good hearted guys.
There are certainly a huge list of scam stories out there that everyone should be aware of so that they can get rid of them. But the general rule is, when you detect it and feel it that you are in a compromising situation like, the other party is asking money for whatever good reason, as long as it you DO NOT KNOW the person personally, do not give in and stop the communication. The scammer will not stop playing with your emotions and imagination until you give her what she is up for — the money. Besides, for love scams, you do not even know if you are communicating with a guy or a gay who wants to extort you money.
Avoiding email spam
An email spam is a different thing. It is oftentimes called as “unsolicited” emails.
The main reason why people send a spam or unsolicited email is to advertise some products or services. However, due to the fact that you did not ask them or give them permission to send you their promotions, that makes the email a spam. That simple.
There are many companies and organizations there that send out legitimate news and promotions to their mailing list. That is, people “opt in” to the mailing list so that they will receive updates and promotional campaigns. Thus, when they receive the promotional emails, as they expected them, these emails are not spam but legitimate. And any time the subscriber wanted to opt out or be removed from the list, the legitimate email provides an “Unsubscribe link”.
The second reason why people send spam email is to distribute their computer malwares and viruses so that you will be victimized by their trap. These kinds of emails are those that contains attachments but when the attachment is opened, the computer is compromised.
In order to avoid spams, there are only two (2) general rules.
- Do not open or read spam emails. This is important because when you open an email, whereever it is stored, be in the Inbox or in the Spam folder, the email message can contain a code or script that will notify the sender of the spam message that you are a good catch or an active email. Remember that spammer sends out emails to illegally collected emails so they need to know which emails are active and which are not. Opening the spam email informs the spammer that yours is an active email. As a result, you will get MORE SPAM!
- Never post your email address in web pages, secure or not. Try to look at web pages like boards and forums and see if there are posted email addresses there. If you find some, then they are likely getting spam emails already. Spammers use a program or tool to scrape and collect email addresses on the web. When the tool picks up your email address, it will store in their database for their next spam blast. Should you need to post your email address in web pages so like forums so that other people can send you a private message through email, the best way to do it is to break the email with spaces like yourname @ yahoo.com. Your intended responder can detect and correct the email address when they will reply to you, but the email collectors cannot.