Everyone who has an email account has, at some point, received messages from strangers in their inbox offering services or items. SPAM is any unsolicited or unwelcome message that you receive. These emails often advertise medicines, diets, sexual enhancement products, and get-rich-quick schemes. There are also fake sales pitches, offers, and various forms of scams.

Alongside share fraud, where spammers dupe you into spending money, phishing is a new, increasingly popular form of spam fraud. The aim of this scam is to obtain personal data such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and so on. For example, an email from PayPal or eBay might ask you to update your account on their website. If you do this, the spammers record your keystrokes and gain access to your personal details.

Have you ever received a plea letter from a widow or the family of a former Nigerian ruler? I'm sure you have. It's a well-known Nigerian scam that's still active on the internet. Don't be fooled by the millions of dollars you're offered. They just want your account details to rob you.

You can tell the difference between spam and legitimate messages by looking at things like the sender's email address, any requests for personal information, and the overall tone and grammar of the message.

The first thing to look out for is the sender's name, which may be unfamiliar or nonsensical. Also, read the subject line of the message. Spam emails usually have a subject line that mentions gambling, pornography, or a promise to earn a fortune in 24 hours. On the other hand, spammers can make an email look exactly like an email from a legitimate source. In some cases, the subject line can give the impression that it is a reply to an email you sent.

A common method for detecting spam is to read the header fields of all messages you receive. You have received spam if you see strange, anonymous, or encrypted alphanumeric email addresses (like gt4590xx@domain.com).

Some anti-spam programs allow you to preview emails before sending them. With G-Lock Spam Combat, for example, you can check the message header in detail, including sender, recipient, subject, and other header information, as well as preview the safe message content.

How can I stop spam?

Remember, the purpose of spam is to get you to open the email. Your least concern is letting the spammer know your email address is valid once you've opened the email. For a spammer, that's just a bonus. They can keep bombarding you hoping you'll eventually take the bait. They can also sell your email address to a third party.

Also remember that spammers send out millions of emails every day, so even a low response rate is a big win for them. Let's say that of ten million people, 100 each invest $5 $ in a spammer's scam. That makes $500 for the spammer each time.

If you're getting a lot of spam, you might want to get a new email address and only give it out to reputable senders.

You can also use anti-spam software to clear your inbox of spam instantly. Anti-spam filters are now quite sophisticated and are effective at filtering out most spam, even if they are not infallible.

Anti-spam software performs the following functions:

1. Checking the e-mail addresses and identities of senders against a blacklist of spammers that carry these addresses, and deleting the message if the sender is on the blacklist.

2. Checking the recipient email addresses and names and filtering messages according to specific criteria. An email is considered spam if it is sent to a large, alphabetically sorted group of recipients.

3. Checking the content and subject line of the message for words or phrases commonly found in spam emails, such as „Viagra“, „Cialis“, „mortgage“ and „invest“, and filtering the corresponding spam emails. Anti-spam software is currently available in various forms. Spam blockers such as Mail Washer, Spam Nullifier, G-Lock Spam Combat and others are available from software developers. Most major free email providers such as Yahoo!, Google, MSN and Hotmail also have strong spam filtering. Now all you have to do is choose the anti-spam solution that best suits your needs.

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