Receiving close to a hundred messages within a couple of days can be very annoying. Spam mails can be so intrusive that you lose important emails in the large pool of spam mails in your inbox. There was a time I was having close to two thousand unread messages in my yahoo mail inbox but I hardly have those crazy messages anymore since I took some measures. Even with spam guard turned on in your gmail or yahoo mail settings, these unwanted bulk mails will still find ways to stream into your inbox. Spam emails have come to stay, that’s a fact we can’t erase. Spam emails are generally sent:
1. by some internet marketers to introduce you to their goods or services
2. by fraudsters to lure you into a scam
3. by hackers to hack you password, infect you computer with malicious softwares or get certain informations about you.
No matter what purpose the spam message is intended, it’s definitely unwanted.
There are certain softwares built basically to harvest emails online, many spammers operate “bots”: autonomous software robots that “crawl” the Web searching for email addresses. Some site owners or webmasters you gave your email during registration on their site might even sell your email address to spammers. For this reason you should:
1. Never post your email address publicly on web forums, guest books etc.
2. If you must do this, write your email in this format: myname at somesite dot com
3. Get an email to be used in untrusted sites where you do not actually need a reply
4. Get a private email to be shared with family and friends only.
5. Label unwanted messages as spam as soon as they are received and turn on “spam guard”
6. Use a feedback form instead of giving out your email if you are a webmaster
Some spam messages come with malicious attachments that might get an unsuspecting recipient into a whole lot of trouble. Spamming is now a valuable tool for hackers just like internet marketers too can’t do without it.
Some spam messages too often contain links that lead you straight to a fake website looking like a real one. This is called phising and you will be giving someone your login details freely if you ever fall for the trap.
Based on my own policy, I never open spam mails no matter how interesting the subject may look. I guess you should do the same too. I simply delete them and keep my inbox clean. There’s is no absolute way to stop spam messgaes, you can only control them and limit how your inbox is flooded by being careful online. Always remember to mark and report those messages as spam before deleting to help your spam guard work better.
There are speculations that gmail has a better spam protection than yahoo mail but this is not completely true, the amount of those unwanted spam messages you receive depends on how you use your email. You can stop spam mails if you want to!