Dirty Email Tricks

Spammers are always looking for new ways to profit from what they do, especially taking into account the fact that almost everyone know that spam exists and trying to protect themselves as strongly as possible. As spam was mostly advertising in the beginning of Internet era, now its goal is significantly changed.

This time advertisers had turned away from spam services and no more think of them as of direct marketing tools. Thus, a lot of spam machines left unused, their owners incurred awful losses, and while they are not ready to switch to another business models, they started signing contracts with anybody just to cover their asses. The result is that spam machines are now used against people and we should keep our eyes open to efficiently protect ourselves from their pressure.

I am not talking of replying to junk emails - this is strictly prohibited. As much you write them back, as more spam you get in the result as your replies show your email address is working and active. I am talking of opening and reading the messages coming from untrusted sources, because it could also be very and very dangerous.

When junk mail comes to my e-mail box, I am following the simple and effective rules given below to get rid of this trash. Hope you can also find them useful.

• Never open email message sent to you by someone you don't know.
  
• If you were attracted by title, or not sure that you do not know the sender, never open attachments from that email. The message text could help you understand if this is worth to read and operate.
• If you think email comes from your bank or insurance company and the message text tells you to verify your identity in that institute, I would recommend giving them a call and ask for advice. I can not recall any of the financial institutes that sends "change your password" or "validate your identity" emails. Most probably they do know nothing about that message, and it should be moved to trash w/o any excuse.
• Verify links given in the email. Bad guys usually decorate their messages in the same way as trusted sources do, but the links they provide to click on in all cases reference to unknown web sites.
  
• Do not open picture files, ZIP archives and EXE files coming as attachments to the emails. If you are not sure that message is junk, find a way to contact sender back by any other mean than replying to the email you've got.
• The email stating that you won $1,000,000 is junk. I know, it's hard to believe but true.
  
• If email sounds suspicious, ask for advice around or in internet forums - not only you get suspicious emails and they are actively discussed by internet community.

The list above does not include much details, but in general I find it very helpful to identify and sort spam messages out.