Spam Email: Awareness

What is Spam email or junk email? It is the negative side of email marketing. It's an email sent without explicit consent from the recipient. Spam emails generally try to sell questionable goods or are downright deceitful.

What is the goal of spam email?

The core of spam is to make a profit. Sending Mass email is easy and cheap compared to physical mail. Near 250 billion emails are shipped all over the place every day, and 45.1% of them are spam.

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In most cases, spammers hide unwanted emails with the coating of promotions offering something from "diet remedies" to "100% working therapy for the health of people". Apart from commercials, the most common types of spam include emails about financial independence by honouring simple instructions.

According to the ROKSO( Register of Known Spam Operations ), most of the world's spam activity comes from about a hundred so-called "spam gangs" operating mainly in different countries or locations.

Reasons behind Spam Emails:

1. Generated email of yours was random.

2. Expose your email address during a data leakage.

3. A dishonest company sold your email.

4. Your email was harvested by a specialized tool.

5. Someone's contact list stole your email.

Generated email of yours was random. Cybercriminals combine common user names with famous domain names like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. They ship junk mail emails to all generated email addresses, and if the email was delivered and opened, it signals that the email address is accurate.

Expose your email address during a data leakage. It is the main reason behind spam email spreading, which happens even to large organizations like Adobe, LinkedIn, and Last. FM. It is a security threat because it may include names, passwords, and email addresses. Spammers use this data for illegal activities, knowing that most emails are active.

A dishonest company sold your email. Some dirty players on the email market sell their mailing lists to spammers.

Your email was harvested by a specialized tool. If you ever published your email address on the internet, spammers may steal it using tools for crawling the internet for an @ symbol, which is used primarily at the beginning of the email domain — bob_behappy@mail.com.

Someone's contact list stole Your email.   If spammers figure out your friend's email address and password, scan the contact list to get new addresses and send more spam.

What is the difference between Spam & Phishing

Phishing is an advanced type of spam email. Thieves disguise themselves as well-known brands with an excellent reputation to get sensitive data like users' names, passwords, credit cards, bank accounts, etc. They usually frighten or excite users leading them to a fake website where they cheat people for their money.

Spam is a mass copy sent to many people at once, mainly in an attempt to sell crummy products like revolutionary remedies, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. It is not as sophisticated as phishing, and it doesn't require a rich technical background.

How can you stop spam email?

1. Do not give an email address to unknown companies.

2. Mark suspicious emails as spam

3. Never publish your email address on websites.

4. Do not open spam emails.

5. Customize ESP's filters

Though email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. are armed with spam filters to ensure your safety, it might be not enough, so here's what you can do to reduce spam:

Do not give an email address to unknown companies. Sharing your data with strangers is a bad idea since the least they can do is sell their mailing list to spammers.

Mark suspicious emails as spam. By doing so, you avoid interacting with dangerous emails. At the same time, you tell the spam filters that emails like the one you marked as spam are unsolicited. Further emails from that sender will automatically land in your spam folder.

Never publish your email address on websites. It is effortless to find email addresses on the internet. Simply googling "gmail.com." may be enough to find thousands of lessons.

Do not open spam emails. Spammers realize that the address is valid when you open a spam email, which you shouldn't do. Expect more spam in your inbox.

Customize ESP's filters. Create filters to block messages that include particular words or phrases, limit the size of the incoming messages, and block specific domain addresses or emails with attachments. Here's how to do it in Gmail.

How to stop emails from being marked as spam?

1. Use proper authentication instruments.

2. Make relevant content

3. Take care of your sender's reputation.

4. Opt-in users

5. Use a reliable bulk email service.

6. Check emails for spam.