Archive for October 24th, 2008
Spam Prevention Tips #6
Just don’t do it. Ever. There is nothing to be gained from responding to spam email at all. By now, most of us know that spammers speculate when they send us spam, by guessing thousands of email addresses. Most of the spam they send ends up nowhere as they are addressed to mailboxes that don’t exist or are stopped by anti spam filters. However, when spam messages do get the past spam blocker, and does get through to our mailboxes, one of the most surefire ways to confirm to spammers that they have found a live email account, is to send them a reply of any sort.
So don’t reply advising them that they must have got the wrong address (they didn’t) and definitely don’t try to unsubscribe from their fake email list. These actions will just get you more spam as the only thing it does is confirm your address is live. The spammers will then sell this information to other spammers at a premium, and you’ll find that more of their spam heads your way.
So does that mean you should never unsubscribe from email lists? Well, no. We’re just saying that if you don’t remember signing up for that particular newsletter then, chances are you didn’t. It’s another trick of spammers and anti spam agencies have been advising email users about this for many years. The best thing you can do with spam is just delete it. Better if you can delete it without even opening the message. Better still is to tag it as spam if your email programme supports this. Doing so tells the anti spam software that the message is spam and trains it to better detect it as spam the next time it arrives
