How to prevent spam emails?

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How Spammers Get the Mail IDs

Spammers use various methods to get the email addresses. Some of them are listed below

• Mailing Lists

  There are a lot of companies that sell emails. These companies will create a website for people to register in their site, which may be a social site or job portal site or a blog etc. When they get enough list of emails, the will sell this id’s to spammers and there by receives a good profit. Addresses are most usually correct and updated, and people actually open the emails sent to them expecting important messages

• Web Pages

  Spammers use software programs that spider through web pages, looking for email addresses. It is easy for them to collect email ids from a web page using this software.

• Guessing

  Guessing could be done based on the fact that email addresses are based on people's name. Spammers sometimes guess email addresses and send a test message to those ids. Then they wait for either a confirmation or an error message to return by email, indicating the status of the ids. A confirmation could be obtained by inserting mail headers requesting the delivery system or mail client to send a confirmation of delivery or reading.

  Another method of confirming valid email addresses is sending HTML in the email's body, and embedding an image. Mail clients like Outlook and Eudora decode the HTML by trying to fetch the image. Some spammers put the recipient's email address in the image's URL, and check the web server's log for the email addresses of recipients who viewed the spam. So it's good advice to set the mail client to *not* preview rich media emails, which would protect the recipient from both accidentally confirming their email addresses to spammers and viruses.

• Yahoo People Search

  Yahoo people search will show results with email addresses which can later be extracted using email extractor software easily.

• Hacking the websites and mail servers

  Spammers may use most sophisticated methods of hacking and crack into the less secured servers which store email ids.

• Virus or Worms

  Spammers use viruses and worms which spread by emailing themselves to all the email addresses they can find in the address book present in the computer they infect. When they got infected in a computer they will not only spam copies of itself, but also send the extracted list of email addresses to it's creator.

• IRC Chat Rooms

  Some IRC clients will give a user's email address to anyone who requests it. Many spammers harvest these live email addresses from IRC, and send spam to those ids.

How can we prevent spams?

As spammers use sophisticated methods for sending spams, E-mail spam has steadily, even exponentially grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. So it is not easy to prevent spam emails completely.

SpyPig is a simple email tracking system that sends you a notification email as soon as the recipient opens and reads your message. Spammers also use the tools like spypig and the fact is that when ever you open the spam email, they record your email as actively working. Then they flood your inbox with spam mails. So, the better thing you can do is to delete the mail without opening or set it as spam.

A good practice for preventing spam email is to keep a minimum of three email accounts. One for work related activities. Second one for personal conversations and contacts and third one can be used as a disposable one. That means that you should always sign up for newsletters and contests only through your third email account. If you have to register an account in a website or job site or other social networking sites, you should only use your third email account. The third account should always be a freebie account such as those offered by Gmail or yahoo or hotmail etc. You should plan on having to dump and change out this account every six months, as the catch-all account will eventually become spammed when a newsletter manager decides to sell your name or a spammer steals your email address off a Web site.

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