… which doesn’t include the 100 or so emails that I actually want to receive. That’s actually not unusual, considering how many lists I’ve subscribed to and my overall online activity. After all, I work on the Internet and am on my computer all day long. Most of the spam emails actually get caught by my spam filters, so I don’t have to weed through them. I still get about fifty or so that I do have to delete which is of course a waist of time. What can you do about it?
Often, nothing – just delete the spam emails and move on. If it is truly spam, there probably isn’t an unsubscribe link, and if there is, I don’t trust it, so I just delete the message. Often, when I’m just curious about something, I provide a “temporary” email. By temporary, I don’t mean a bogus email like MickeyMouse@disney.com or FredFlintstone@bedrock.com, I mean a real email address that gets forwarded to my primary email so that I can actually receive what is being offered or where I can check on my order. But it is an email that I change every few months to avoid being on a spam list.
When you do get spam, most of us are smart enough to not click on an email like this:
And we probably even know that these kinds of email messages are just phishing for information…
But what about when you get an email that appears to be from your bank or from PayPal, such as this:
Be careful! Remember, your bank and/or PayPal already have your personal information, so they don’t need to ask you for it. I would assume that PayPal also knows my name, not just “Dear customer”. Do NOT click on any links inside of such an email. Instead, go directly to the site and login as normal to see if there really is any suspicious activity. Look to see who the email is really from and verify the links.
Here is another example that I just got:
Upon closer inspection we can see that this certainly isn’t from FedEx and it doesn’t point to the FedEx site:
It is also a good idea to check the email header to determine where the email came from. You can then add that information to your spam settings to avoid getting future emails from the malicious site.Here is what the header looks like for this fake FedEx email:
Don’t open any email that you don’t know who its from, and certainly don’t respond to it or click on any links – just delete it and flag it as spam. As always, be safe!
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