Recognizing SPAM, how do you do that?
Jun
17
Written by:
6/17/2010 8:24 AM
Recognizing SPAM, how do you do that? Actually, it’s really quite simple; Suspect everything is SPAM unless proven otherwise. While that may sound flippant, and not particularly helpful, I can assure you that as someone who get upwards of 100 or so messages a day that are SPAM, it’s far easier and safer to look for legitimate email that I care about, then trying to weed out all the SPAM.
There are plenty of services that provide email SPAM filtering, and most modern email systems do a fairly good job at it too, but because this is an arms race between those who would SPAM you and those who would filter it out, the threshold of what is SPAM and what is not, is constantly shifting.
One thing you can do is ratchet up your SPAM filter settings; almost all email systems now provide settings that allow this. You might have to dig around a little to find them. Just BING or GOOGLE what you’re trying to find out: In this case I would BING or GOOGLE, “Hotmail spam settings”. This will bring you up a list of web sites explaining your options.
The next best thing you can do is tell your email system that a particular sender or domain is junk or not junk. If you’re using Outlook or Windows Live Mail, and many other platforms, you can right click on a particular message and tell the application that it’s junk or safe. Be careful about assigning a domain as safe. For example if you assign a sender with the email address someone@hotmail.com as a safe domain, then all Hotmail messages will be treated as safe. I usually only do this will small domains, like mine, where there may be only a few people emailing me using that domain, and spammers are unlikely to bother with it.
Lastly, here are some things to look out for. 1. Don’t open all those attached funny pictures and jokes that your friends are sending you; they could very well contain SPAM or viruses. 2. Messages asking for information of any kind, that you’re not patiently waiting to receive, are SPAM. Your bank or any other web site for that matter is not going to send a message asking you to change your password. 3. If you’re not sure if it’s SPAM, you can easily find out by doing a search of the email’s subject line. For example: Right now I have a message in my inbox from Skype informing me that they’ve confirmed my payment. Obviously this is SPAM, but to double check I can BING or GOOGLE “Skype We’ve delivered your purchase,” and find that within the first couple of results other people have already identified this message as SPAM. Interestingly, I found that Google gave a much better result than did Bing.
Remember, no amount of antivirus software is going to protect you if you tell the computer to install something, and that’s exactly what you’re doing if you open a malicious attachment.