How to Protect Your Email Accounts from Spam Advertisements  

Whether in the office or at home, we all have email boxes flooded with junk email. Ironically, junk email basically has become an accepted reality.  Until the 1980s, these types of communications were not called spam emails. The first spam email was sent on the network of military computers way before everyone used the Internet on a daily basis. In 1978, Gary Turk sent email requests to around 400 people to advertise his new computer business. In 2003, the U.S. government passed the CAN-SPAM Act that allows the Federal Trade Commission to restrict spammers. However, CAN-SPAM does not restrict advertisers from sending email without the recipient’s permission.

Numerous sites on the Internet warn both system administrators and potential users/recipients about new sources of spam.  Many spam-advertising schemes target the needs/wants of consumers and urge users to hit a link button in order to satisfy that need. Examples include “get-rich-quick” schemes, other money-making schemes, pornographic websites, and more. The statistics of total email traffic indicate that spam is 66.41% of total email traffic across the globe. This figure has been reduced to 55.78% in recent years.

Reasons Why Spam Emails Are a Big Headache 

• Cost-effectiveness for the advertiser: Sending bulk emails turns out to be cost effective. With the help of the Internet, spammers find it easy to send thousands of emails per hour. Entering the market at such minimal costs and means is a dream for any advertiser but can also be a nightmare for the recipients if the email is unwanted.
• Fraud: According to many surveys conducted, the majority of regular Internet users expressed strong dislike for spam emails. Looking at the strong negative feelings of consumers, some Internet Service Providers have taken extensive measures to decrease the spam distributed through their systems by setting up protocols that have the ability to sort and filter email. However, these filters are not able to completely bar spam emails as junk-email senders often find new ways to change the locations/originations of their ISP addresses.
• Theft: Spam emails expose recipients to potential identity theft and financial theft.
• Loss to legitimate marketers: As much as spam email is annoying to the recipient, it threatens the livelihood of the legitimate marketer. The legitimate marketer has to create new ways to differentiate his/her message to the potential client from bulk emails in order to make a real impact on the potential customer. This constant creativity comes at a huge cost involving many hours of research and man-hours.
• Consumer opinion: Email has gained popularity as one of the best tools for carrying out business interactions besides social media, but users have grown wary of opening emails due to fear that opening unknown emails may release malware.  Because of that distrust in email marketing, some legitimate marketers fail to reach potential clients.

How To Reduce Spam Emails

Some tricks can help reduce the number of spam emails that reach your inbox:

• Before you start the sign-up process on any website, check the terms and conditions carefully. The site may have an option for receiving marketing emails. Check the opt-out box if you don’t want to receive marketing emails.
• Search for the “unsubscribe” link at the end of a spam email to get yourself removed from the list.
• Do not reply to any spam email. Spammers sometimes guess different email addresses, and replying to their email confirms that your email account is valid. Instead, block the spammer’s email address.
• If you receive emails that seem suspicious, do not click on any links; they could be links designed to obtain your personal data. If you click a suspicious link accidently, change your passwords immediately.
• If you use GMAIL, try this: When you enter your email, enter it as username+trialsite@gmail.com rather than just entering username@gmail.com. When Gmail checks “+” in any email address, it utilizes the characters that appear on the left-hand side of the plus sign to determine to whom the email should be sent. If you look for username+trialsite.com, while searching Gmail, you can see the messages sent to that particular email address.
• To find out the sender of any particular message, click on links that say “show details” to view the sender’s complete email address.
• Create a different or alternative email account for signing up to services or websites. Use security software and change passwords frequently.
• Most spam filters available today are quite effective. Email providers have spam filters that help detect spam email and block it immediately, storing it in a special folder. You can set up a filter so that next time you get uninvited emails, they will automatically be redirected to the spam or separate folder. If you are getting spam emails regularly, block the email address, so that next time it goes to the spam folder automatically. However, sometimes spam filters inadvertently send non-spam to the spam folder, so keep checking your spam folder to make sure only unwanted emails are going there.
• Do not download attachments that may include malware that in turn can download other malicious programs that can infect your computer.

In conclusion, stay educated on where spam email comes from and how to avoid it. That should make sifting through your business email much quicker.