Spam email messages biggest problem 17 ways to filter

Which is the best beginner’s guide to spam?

Did you know that the largest single source of spam comes from zombies — computers that are hijacked by viruses and Trojans, which put the owners of those machines unknowingly to work sending spam for others?

Criminals may also send spam in order to trick you into divulging personal information, so they can steal your identity or hack into your bank account. Spammers may also send you viruses as attachments or tricks that lead you to Websites where you’ll infect yourself with spyware.

Every e-mail address that appears on a Website or in any other publicly available location is vulnerable to being harvested by Web bots or spiders and sold or given away to spammers on private mailing lists.

Definition

Spam is the name for unsolicited e-mail, and it’s a problem that never seems to go away.

Between 5% and 10% of all e-mail sent worldwide is spam.

Even if the only thing spammers are trying to sell you is a miracle weight loss pill, they’re still stealing your hard drive space and slowing down your computer when they send their messages to you without your permission.

As seen before, spam email is a type of unsolicited commercial email that is sent without the recipient’s consent. It is often sent in large quantities and contains content that is irrelevant or unwanted by the recipient, against the spam and abuse policy of the email service provider.

History

Spam email became prevalent in the early 1990s as businesses began to use mass emailing as a way to promote their products and services. Today, spam emails are still a problem for many people who use email, though there are some effective ways to filter out these messages.

17 effective ways to filter and fix spam emails biggest email marketing problem

If you’re like most people, you probably receive more spam than legitimate email. Spam can be annoying and even dangerous. It’s a good idea to filter out spam and prevent it from reaching your inbox.

Here are 17 ways to filter and fix spam email messages:

Use an email client that blocks spam

Popular email clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird feature built-in spam filters that can help reduce the amount of junk mail you receive.

Install an antivirus program on your computer that includes a firewall and antispam capabilities

A firewall helps protect against viruses and other malicious software, while an antivirus program can identify and quarantine any infected files found on your computer. Antispam software will scan messages for known spammy words or phrases and block them from being delivered to your inbox by default (you can always change this setting later if necessary)

Use third-party anti-spam services such as SpamCop (from Microsoft) or Spamhaus Project (from London’s Royal Mail).

These online services including Cloudmark can help you report spammers who send you unwanted messages. They maintain lists of known spammers and their IP addresses. Volunteers around the world frequently update and monitor the Internet for them. When you report a spammer’s IP address to one of these services, all its servers are added to the blacklist, so no further messages from those servers can reach you.

Check the sender’s address against these known spammers’ lists. Many email clients let you create a list of known spammers’ addresses so that you don’t have to see their messages anymore. If an email comes from one of these addresses, it’s probably spammy — even if it looks like it came from someone else entirely!

Before you look for Mailbait or Akismet alternatives

1. Check your email inbox regularly
2. Report the sender as spam
3. Set up a rule to put suspected spam messages in a junk folder
4. Don’t reply to or open any suspicious emails, even if they come from a friend’s account or contain pictures of cute kittens
5. Don’t give out personal information online unless you’re sure who’s asking for it
6. Don’t click on links in emails from people you don’t know very well
7. Don’t download attachments from unknown senders or files sent from unknown sources on the web, even if they appear to be coming from friends or family members—they could contain viruses or malware designed to steal your identity and personal information like credit card numbers
8. Set up rules in your email program so that important messages are never automatically deleted
9. Use a spam filter software like Outlook or Gmail
10. Enable Smart Filters in Gmail
11. Use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols on your domain name to authenticate your emails and prevent spooking
12. Use a whitelist instead of a blacklist
13. Create rules for your email client based on keywords, IP addresses, etc., so you don’t have to manually search for them every time they arrive in your inbox
14. If you use POP3/IMAP, set up email forwarding so that all messages from a specific address go into one folder; then delete those folders regularly (and make sure they’re not being forwarded somewhere else)
15. Block certain words, phrases or subjects in your email client’s junk mail filters (though these can get out of hand quickly)
16. Set up rules for incoming mail based on senders’ names and domains in Gmail’s “Filters and Blocked Addresses”

Quotes to that helps you answer the question of why spammers are winning

“Who has time to manually spam websites? That can’t be very cost-effective.”
— Eric Cheng

“If you’re making a bunch of little decisions – like, ‘do I read this email now or later?’ ‘Do I file it?’ ‘Do I forward it?’ ‘Do I have to get more information?’ ‘Do I put it in the spam folder?’ – that’s a handful of decisions right there, and you haven’t done anything meaningful. It puts us into a brain state of decision fatigue.”
—Daniel Levitin

“This is like the telephone problem – no one wants to have the first one.
But we are seeing a lot of people who want some sort of technology to solve the spam problem.”
— Eric Allman

“The Senate voted 97-0 for an anti-spam bill to stop those annoying things you get on your computer. The senators made it very clear that when you start misleading the American people and start taking their money over false promises, that’s our turf, buddy!”
— Jay Leno

“By the time we enter this work world, and we’re breadwinners, we enter a world that’s just cluttered with spam, fake, digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers – a deception epidemic.”
—Pamela Meyer

“The Internet is both great and terrible.
As a source of information, a tool for delivering music and art, it’s great. But spamming ads and piracy of music is terrible. It’s stealing.”
— Gary Wright

“I hate spam, and that’s what happens when you let businesses onto the network.”
— Jan Koum

Quotes to help you seize control of your email inbox 30 seconds a day

“I can’t say I’m particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we’re now seeing, whether it’s filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.”
— Robert E. Kahn

“Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam. Con artists prowl the listings, paying sellers with fake cashier’s checks and luring buyers to share their credit card numbers.”
― Gary Wolf

“Spam is a waste of the receivers’ time, and, a waste of the sender’s optimism.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We already know that spam is a huge downside of online life. If we’re going to be spammed on our telephones wherever we go, I think we’re going to reject these devices.”
― Howard Rheingold

“I’ve learned how to use my spam filter pretty effectively.”
— Al Yankovic

“Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.”
— Maria Konnikova

“On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!”
— Vinton Cerf

“Anyone with an inbox knows what I’m talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc’s and spam.”
— Ryan Holmes

Quotes on the biggest war by interent marketers

“SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.”
— Bill Gates

“Advertising has to be contextual, as the potential in ‘push’ marketing is fairly limited and is largely viewed as spam. Thus there is a need to get into ‘permission’ marketing and ‘pull’ marketing to deliver value to marketers.”
— Naveen Tewari

“The internet is 95 percent porn and spam.”
― Margaret Atwood

“There are fun parts of running a startup and not so fun parts, and Facebook handles the not so fun parts, like infrastructure, spam, sales. The real questions are, how big can ‘Instagram’ get? Is it 400 million, or bigger? Can it be a viable business if it is that big? These are at the top of the list for everyone in Silicon Valley.”
― Kevin Systrom

“The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.”
— Bill Gates

“Think about spam filters; if email didn’t come from someone that someone you know knows, that’s an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don’t. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.”
— Clay Shirky

“A love letter lost in the mail, forgotten, miss delivered and then discovered years later and received by the intended is romantic. A love letter ending up in someone’s spam filter is just annoying.”
― B.J. Neblett

“Don’t spam your music to people… let the people around you share it.”
― YBN Nahmir

“I get more spam than anyone I know.”
— Bill Gates

“With Akismet there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.”
Matt Mullenweg

“Electronic mail systems can, if used by many people, cause severe information overload problems. The cause of this problem is that it is so easy to send a message to many people, and that systems are often designed to give the sender too much control of the communication process, and the receiver too little control….

People get too many messages, which they do not have time to read. This also means that the really important messages are difficult to find in the large flow of less important messages. In the future, when we get larger and larger message systems, and these systems get more and more interconnected, this will be a problem for almost all users of these systems.”

― Jacob Palmer

Ever wondered why the intrusive email in your inbox is so annoying?

“When a guest blogger can’t even be bothered sharing their own post on their social networks; they’re pretty much admitting ‘I don’t care about this post, and I don’t want to be associated with it’. In the end these guests posts are just another form of spam.”
— George Stevens

“Every major communication tool on the Internet has spam and abuse problems. All email services, blogging services and social networks have to dedicate a significant amount of resources and time to fighting abuse and protecting their users.”
― Evan Williams

“Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted.
It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.”
— Bill Gates

“Ultimately, Captchas are useless for spam because they’re designed to tell you if someone is ‘human’ or not, but not whether something is spam or not.”
— Matt Mullenweg

“The success of social media companies largely depends on our failure not to spend too much time on their platforms.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The marooned friend is one of the best-known scams, principally because it’s the one that dodges the spam filter most often. It comes from someone you know but often only tangentially. It’s since become – hands down – one of my favourite scams.”
― James Veitch

“The absolute deterioration of the wiki concept is just a matter of time.
Once spam mechanisms are developed to eat into these systems, the caretakers will be too busy to stop the public-driven deterioration.”
— John C. Dvorak

The idea that you don’t spam people with five emails a day or that you offer free shipping just seemed obvious to us, because that’s how we want to be treated as consumers.
— Neil Blumenthal

“When you sign up for Instagram, you are agreeing to their terms of service.
When you put content up, you agree that while you own the content you are giving them rights to it as well.
This did not go into effect recently.
This is common place for many social sites.
And you can not post a picture with a statement saying that you do not agree to the agreement you have already agreed to by using the site.”
― Loren Weisman

“Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day.
Much of it offers to ‘help me get out of debt or get rich quick.’ It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.”
— Bill Gates

“Most of us lived through the years when spam threatened to destroy e-mail. Today, democracy is being weakened by lies that come in waves and pound our senses the way a beach is assaulted by the surf. Leaders who play by the rules are having trouble staying ahead of a relentless news cycle and must devote too much effort trying to disprove stories that seem to come out of nowhere and have been invented solely to do them in.”
― Madeleine K. Albright

“No one bill will cure the problem of spam.
It will take a combined effort of legislation, litigation, enforcement, customer education, and technology solutions.”
— David Baker

“Most people haven’t been to Paris at all.”
“Not unless you’re counting Paris, Texas.”
“Or Paris, Illinois.”
“Paris, Maine,” Neil countered.
“Paris, Idaho,” I added with a nod. “And Paris, Arkansas.”
“There’s a Paris, Arkansas?” Neil asked, eyebrows high.
“Yup. Kentucky, too. And a couple others…”
“How do you know this?”
“A potent blend of Where in America Is Carmen Sandiego?, curiosity, and the Internet.”
“Who said technology never offered anything useful?”
“I’m guessing victims of e-mail scams.”
― Hillary Manton Lodge

“Spam sounds like a big problem for everyone but me.”
― Candy the Cat

“What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase.
Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.”
— P. J. O’Rourke0

“I use Spam Arrest because of the amount of junk mail I get. Any legitimate person who wants to send me a message has to jump through hoops before they can be added to my opt-in list.”
— Kevin Mitnick

Quote on the spam meat product

This is not a blog post on cooking spam, frying spam, or spam ingredients​, but here is a quote on what the Brand stands for:

“100% True Fact: Spam means;
Sizzle, Pork and Mmmm. Someone tell me I’m wrong…”
― Skylar Blue

How do you deal with spambots?

The problem with spam email is that it can be hard to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. If you get an email that looks like it’s from your bank, and it’s offering you a great deal on something, is that really from your bank or just some scammer trying to get your money?

Now link up with these creators who do not spam

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Sources

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Circle-of-spam.png

How To Get Less Spam in Your Email | Consumer Advice –

How to Avoid Spam Filters in Email Marketing (The Right Way!) – Tailwind App

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