Learn How Email SPAMMERS Work – Fight Back

Email SPAM - An Ounce of Prevention

It’s difficult to fight SPAM without knowing how SPAMMERS work.  The goal of a SPAMMER is to capture your email address.  They use a wide variety of ways to get that email address.  Here are some common ones:

1. Searching the Web For Your Email

- They use software to search websites for email address’.

- If your email address is on a website somewhere you can expect to get SPAM.

2. Guessing Your Email Address

-They use sophisticated programs to guess email address’ at domain names.  

-It’s possible that you could open an email account under any domain name and receive SPAM email within minutes.  

-This is especially true at the large free email providers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail.

One they have an email address they need to test it, to see if it’s real.  The spammer didn’t know if your email address is a real address or just gibberish. Multiple techniques are used here as well to verify that you and your email address are valid. You may even recognize some of these techniques:

1. Links

- You’ll receive an email with almost any type of text, it may even look like a real email from your bank, newsletter, your email company, a colleague, family, or friend.

What To Look Out For:
- The thing to look out for is the link in the email, be suspicious of the link. 

- Once you click it they can verify the email account exists, it belongs to a human being, and they’ll be sending SPAM to it on a regular basis.

- DO NOT CLICK THE LINK

2. Images

- You’ll receive an email with possibly no text in it or gibberish text from what appears to be some novel or news article.

- The email has an image in it.

What To Look Out For:

- Any email from someone you don’t know that contains an image.  

- This type of email will NOT show up with an attachment icon, the image is not attached to the email. Instead a different technique is used.

- You may not even see an actual image, it could be a ‘transparent’ image, but it is there.

- Once the email is opened or even previewed the SPAMMER knows the email address exists and is valid.  

- Technically speaking what happens is that the image is sitting on a web server, it’s not attached to the email like you might do when sending pictures to friends.  

- The email is coded in such a way that your email program acts like a web browser and it goes out to the web to retrieve that image.  Then you see the image in your email account.

3. Code

- You’ll receive what appears to be a blank email or one with text.

- The email in fact has hidden programming code in it that ‘wakes up’ when the email is opened or previewed.

- In most cases you won’t see the programming at all, you would need to view the source code of the email itself.

What To Look Out For:

In this case it could be any email from anyone.  A clever SPAMMER might even be using an address book they took from a Spyware infected machine.  If your email address is in the infected machine’s the SPAMMER will send an email to you.  The email you receive might look like it’s from your friend, but in fact is from the SPAMMER who is trying to confirm the email address is real.

Email Security

I’m sure you have recognized at least one of the scenarios above.  In fact almost any piece of email from anyone, even someone you trust, could in fact be from a SPAMMER and laced with tracking information or worse.

Email Security - You can do something about it:

Protect Yourself

1.      Use separate private and public email address’.  The private address is given to only those you trust.  The public one is for everyone else and should be setup with one of the free email providers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail Email.  They have built in SPAM protection and you don’t have to download it to your computer and worry about additional issues (Spyware infection, malware, etc.).

2.      Use SPAM filters. Most good free email providers include a wide variety of protection.  PC based SPAM filters like SpamPal (http://www.spampal.org/) filter your email before you get it to block tracking code, images, blocks blacklisted known senders, and SPAM like email types.  We use it all our machines and it’s free!

3.      Use a firewall and virus protection.  If at home or at work make sure you have both.

4.      Don’t give out your private email address or post it to the web.

5.      Don’t open any piece of email from someone you don’t know. Look at the sender name and the subject line, trash it if it looks out of place.

6.      Turn off the ‘preview’ feature in programs like Outlook and Outlook Express.  From a SPAMMERS point of view this is the same as opening it since the image loads and the tracking code loads.

These tips can help clean up your inbox and save you valuable time that would have otherwise been spent going through your SPAM to find real email.