Blog

SPAM – Part 4

How To Be Proactive Against SPAM

In this final part of the series, we will explore strategies for combating distractions, cultivating good habits, and gaining better control over our inboxes.

Never Respond To SPAM

If you’re certain an email is spam before you open it, don’t open it. If you open it and then realise it’s spam, close it. Avoid clicking any link from a message that you even remotely suspect is spam.

If you opened a spam because it appeared to be coming from a friend or co-worker, contact them immediately and inform them that their account has been compromised, and/or contact your service provider for assistance.

 

Don’t Open Suspicious Emails

Spammers’ new technique: collect email addresses by sending emails that contain a tracking pixel, typically a 1×1 pixel image, which tracks whether an email was opened. If you open a spam email that contains a tracking pixel, the spammer receives a notification that the email was opened, and they now know your email address is active. Even if you realise after opening the mail that it’s spam and didn’t click any links in the email, it’s too late.

The best way to avoid having your email address captured in this way is simply to avoid opening emails from senders you don’t recognise.

However, that’s not always practical—an email from an unknown sender could be a potential customer,  a job offer, or other unexpected but important message. If you need to open emails from senders you don’t recognise, here are some ways to avoid getting your email addresses captured by tracking pixels:

• If you use Gmail, try Ugly Email (free) and/or PixelBlock (free). Ugly Email is a Gmail extension that displays an eye icon next to any email that includes a tracking pixel. PixelBlock blocks tracking pixels, preventing notifications from being sent back to senders when you open a tracked email.
• If you use Outlook 365, 2016, 2013, 2010, or 2007, images are blocked by default. Never ask Outlook to display images from senders you don’t recognise, and you should be safe from most tracking pixels.
• If you use Outlook.com, images display by default. Currently, this cannot be disabled. If tracking pixels are a big concern for you, consider upgrading to Office 365.
• If you use Mail for Mac, images display by default, but the setting is optional. With Mail for Mac open, click Mail and select Preferences. Then, click the Viewing tab and uncheck the box labeled “Load remote content in messages.”

Hide Your Email Address

It’s a sad fact: the more people have your email address, the more spam you’ll receive. So keep your address as hidden as possible.

Unless it is necessary, don’t publish it on the web.  If necessary, use a disposable address for this purpose.

Use ‘burner’ email addresses when you’re required to enter an email address for subscriptions, trials, etc.. Some examples of disposable email address providers:

• Blur (free). Burner Emails lets you create a custom, unique email address each time you need to provide your email address to a company. Each generated email address forwards the message you receive to your personal email account.
• Spamex (subscription). With Spamex Disposable Email Addresses, you can safely provide a working email address to anyone and not have to worry about whether they will send you unwanted email or sell your email address to others.
• Nada (free) provides users with a permanent junk email address and private inbox, so it’s a decent alternative to creating a junk email address. All emails sent to your account are deleted after seven days, and only you have access to your inbox. You can also create multiple inboxes on Nada if you need multiple temporary accounts.
• Guerrilla Mail (free). If you need to send an email from a temporary email address, use Guerrilla Mail. It allows you to receive emails at a temporary email address—each email is automatically deleted after an hour—and send emails from that address as well. However, sent emails aren’t necessarily private; they include your IP address in the subject line to discourage people from using the service to send illegal emails.

If you absolutely have to publish your email address online, at least write it in a nontraditional format (e.g., name [at] domain [dot] com). Humans can figure out what your email address is, but it’s more difficult for scrapers, spiders, and crawlers.

Train Your Junk Mail Filters

All good email applications, as well as some web-based email applications, have their version of ‘Junk’ mail filtering.

When a spam email makes its way into your inbox, never just delete it. Always mark it as spam. This is how the automatic spam filters learn to identify spam and filter it out.

Here’s how to mark an email as spam in the more commonly used email applications: Gmail, Outlook, and Mail for Mac:

• In Gmail, check the box next to a spam email, then click the “Report spam” button.

• In Outlook, older versions, right-click on the spam email in your inbox and select “Mark as junk.” In the newer versions of the Message tab, click ‘Junk’ as shown below.

• In Mail for Mac, right-click on the spam email and click “Move to Junk.”

Change your email address

Email addresses that have been in use for several years can sometimes receive so much spam that there may be only one option: to change your email address. This is a drastic option, but if you’ve responded to spam in the past or haven’t hidden your address, and are therefore overloaded with spam, it may be your only choice.

If your situation has reached the breaking point with old email accounts overwhelmed by spam, contact our support department, and we will assist with the transition from an old account to a new one.

With that, we conclude our series on SPAM. We hope that the articles have been informative and valuable. Please feel free to leave any comments below.

Be vigilant, click safe!

SPAM – Part 3

Continuing with this series, we are going to look at:

• How can we spot SPAM and tell the difference from legitimate email
• Adjust our emailing habits to protect our email identities

Spotting SPAM

Things have progressed significantly since those early days in 1990. Email remains the killer messaging app in terms of sheer volume of users and data. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and all the others combined don’t even come close. Global estimates place the number of email users between 3.5 and 4 billion, with approximately 250 billion messages sent per day. It’s easy to see why a spammer would be attracted to this marketing tactic.

Before we discuss how to identify SPAM, let’s consider the spammer’s goal: to get you to click on a link, any link in the email. The moment you click, you verify that your email address is legitimate to the spammer, i.e., there is a real person behind your email address. Instead of reacting to the email, please send it to your Junk filter.

Different types of SPAM are easier to spot than others. Traditionally, spam emails are little more than advertisements for alternative health products, penny stocks, and financial services, among other things. These are easy to spot. More insidious is the ‘phishing’ type of SPAM email. Have a look at the image below: Is it genuine?

The astute among you will notice that the Amazon logo is not displayed. This is because I have set my email application to not automatically load external links, graphics, etc., as a precaution.

It appears genuine on the surface, except that I have not made a purchase from Amazon. So, how can we tell? In the image above, all the words in blue are links to external websites or servers. So we might assume that those links point to Amazon’s servers. In your email client, being careful not to click, hover your mouse over those links to reveal the true destination, e.g.

Here we see that hovering the mouse over the “Order Details” reveals this link will take us to mileageindia.com, not amazon.com, as we would expect. Oh dear.

Let’s take a closer look at the origins of this email. Behind every fancy or straightforward-looking email are what are called the email headers. These headers tell the whole story— and reveal the truths —of the journey of every email.

Refer to this link for instructions on revealing email headers in various email applications.

There’s a lot of gobbledygook here, so let’s examine the first line. Although the email reply address says “auto-confirm @ amazon.com,” the email headers reveal the truth: that if you replied to this email, it would actually go to “f.marmol- @ -trendnet.com.” Red flag number one. This email is not from whom it pretends to be—looking at the “Received From:” header lines, we can see that this email was sent via a mail server with the domain name “reflexion.net,” which does not handle email for amazon.com. So.. off to the Junk folder with this one.

Change your habits

Once your email address has found its way into the spammer’s collections of people to annoy, it is virtually impossible to get yourself removed from these lists. In some cases, the abuse of an email account (especially one that has been active for several years) may lead to abandoning the account altogether.

As we often need to use an email account for practically everything we wish to do online these days, we suggest using “burner/free” email accounts to register with online services wherever possible. Use Google™ or Yahoo™, for example, and have them forward mail to your real account. That way, if your “burner” account starts attracting too much adverse mail, simply delete the account and set up a new one, leaving your genuine account spam-free.

In the final part of the series, we will explore ways to be proactive in the war against spam and how we can collaborate to rid the world of this scourge.

Until then, be vigilant and click safely!

SPAM – Part 2

In this, the second part of the series, we’ll examine the more insidious side of spam: using your own (compromised) email account, bandwidth, and ISP services to send spam on behalf of or by the spammers.

SPAMMERS are free loaders. They want to do as little and spend as little money as possible to bombard people’s inboxes with junk email. They achieve this by using other people’s email addresses to send out their spam.

Account Compromised

But wait. How do they know your email address and password? Currently, the more common methods to gain your details are:

• ‘phishing web sites’ – the SPAM email contains links to a fake banking site or webmail site, typically asking you to confirm your login details. Don’t do this!
• ‘unsubscribe’ link (or similar). You’ve got SPAM, you know it’s SPAM, but hey, they provide a handy ‘unsubscribe’ link to click, so you don’t receive future emails. Don’t do this!
• you open an attachment from an unknown source, installing malware Don’t do this!
• You chose a weak, easy-to-guess password and/or have been using the same password across multiple sites. Don’t do this!

Malware

Once the bad link is clicked, malware can be silently downloaded and installed on your PC. The malware captures your login details, sends the information to a “Botnet” controller server that collects all these addresses. At a predetermined time, these Botnets are launched, and suddenly your email address is being used to send thousands of SPAM messages to the world.

This is detrimental to you, your ISP, and every other legitimate email user on the Internet. Your email address will become blacklisted, and this may lead to your ISP’s mail servers being blacklisted as well.

OPQ Reacts

At OPQ, we proactively monitor our customers’ outbound emails for signs of potential spam and compromised PCs. When the alarm is triggered, the errant email user’s mail account is suspended, and the password is immediately changed. This usually stops the attack within a few minutes with only a brief interruption to email services.

At this point, OPQ will insist that all devices using the problematic email account be scanned and cleaned with antivirus tools. A report is provided before the account suspension is lifted.

In Part 3 of this series, we’ll explore ways to identify spam more easily and discuss potential methods to stop spam altogether.

SPAM

Variously described as the scourge of the Internet, the bane of every legitimate ISP, and the curse of every email user, how did this can of processed pork and ham become so maligned?

In this first part of the SPAM story, we’ll cover the basics of how it all started and the ‘whys’ and ‘how-tos.

SPAM – What Is It?

A product found in 99% of all supermarkets in America, it sells 80 million pounds every year, has a fan club with 20,000+ members, its own museum, and even its own Broadway musical, Spamalot.

Originally a can of processed meat first produced in the 1930s, made most famous by a Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy sketch (circa 1970), about a restaurant that has spam in every dish and where patrons annoyingly shout spam repeatedly, and finally, from 1990 to the present day, the curse of the communication age.

By the 1990s, with the explosion of the early Internet and the widespread use of email, marketers realised that for virtually no cost, they could send their adverts to thousands of people – the electronic version of ‘Junk Mail’ – no stamp required! This phenomenon was linked to the Monty Python sketch as a reference to the “drowning out of normal communication” on the Internet. Hence, SPAM and “spamming” entered Internet jargon as terms for unwanted content.

The official Internet terms for SPAM are Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) and Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).

 

SPAM – Why Don’t We Want It?

What Can We Do To Help Limit SPAM?

At the ISP (OPQ’s) level, all the most obvious SPAM can be stopped. Although the ISP blocks most of the incoming spam, some will inevitably get through, as the ISP can only identify spam in a broad sense.  Conceivably, some people want fake Rolex watches or to enlarge various body parts. Or, to misquote a well-known axiom, “One man’s meat(SPAM) is another man’s poison….”

For you, the user, use your email app’s Junk Filtering capabilities to deal with the occasional spam that makes it to your inbox.

 

In SPAM – Part 2, we’ll examine some other, more insidious aspects of SPAM.

Be vigilant! Click Safe!