It is said the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Maybe it’s time to add a third certainty…spam.
Like it or not, no matter how sophisticated filtering becomes the spammers seem to stay one step ahead and slip their rogue messages through the mesh to our inbox. Unless we take the draconian and unrealistic action of rejecting all email messages from senders not in our contacts book, clearing out junk mail looks set to be a daily task for the foreseeable future.
That said, we can at least take measures to divert as much of the spam as possible straight to the trash. But how do we spot spam in the first place? What are the hallmarks that let us mark a message as junk without having to open it?
Here are some of the tell-tale signs to look out for which normally indicate that an email is rubbish and can be safely disposed of:
· The message is from someone you don’t know.
· The message is from someone with an unlikely sounding name. (This isn’t always the case.)
· The message is from someone you know intimately. You.
· The subject line contains misspellings and junk characters.
· The subject line contains words like, degree, pharmacy, drugs, mortgage etc.
· The email claims to be offering something for sale or suggests urgent action on your part.
· The subject line bears no relationship to the text of the email.
· The message purports to be from a bank with which you have no account.
· The message purports to be about an auction of which you have no knowledge.
· The message regards a site or subscription that you have never heard of.
Of course, prevention is better than cure. So what can you do to avoid an email address becoming a spam magnet?
1) Set up a separate email address for site registrations. Most sites require registrations to be activated via an email link, so make sure you can pick up messages from any email address you give out.
2) When registering with a new site, check their privacy policy and ensure you are not giving permission for them to sell your address on to a third party. Opt out of receiving email-marketing messages. Read the text carefully before checking or unchecking the box.
3) If your email address appears on a company website, ensure it is not displayed within a mailto: tag as spam bots can read these. Change to a proper web email form instead.
4) Check the domain registration details of your site. If these display an email address, it will have been harvested by now. Find out if webmaster@ is forwarded to your inbox. If so, you’ll want to knock that on the head ASAP.
5) Don’t reply to a spammer as this only confirms that the email address is active. Instead, take a look at the message header as this is likely to reveal from where the email was sent. If it is possible to work out who is supplying the spammer with internet access, drop their ISP line an email to complain. These should usually be addressed to abuse@. They will want to see the header information too, so copy and paste this into the body of the email.
Header information can in most email software be displayed by selecting View/(Message) Headers and selecting All rather than the Normal default setting.
6) Never give out personal or banking details even if the email appears to be genuine. Do not click on any links in the message as you will be taken to a fake site. This type of email fraud activity is known as phishing (pro. fishing) and is how many people end up victims of identity theft.
The best course of action is to check with the company or organisation directly by logging in directly from your browser or by telephoning using a number in the phone book or on one of their printed documents such as a statement or invoice.
Again, you can check the true destination of a link within an email by checking the header information or by viewing the message’s source code. Email software, Mozilla Thunderbird displays a text link’s full URL in the status bar of the preview pane, which is a quick way to pick up on the presence of a phishing email.
