Four Tips To Avoid Spam Emails

Nowadays, only 2 from 20 emails are not spam. The amount of spam emails have become abundant today. Avoiding spam is really important because spam emails may contain viruses, trojan horses or other threats. In this post, I will tell you how you can avoid getting spam emails.

1. Never open or preview spam emails. It could contain something that will notify the senders that you've opened the emails. This will make your email address as a 'live' email address.

2. Search the Google for your email address and try to remove all of it because the spambots could harvest your email address from the web pages.

3. Unsubscribing from spam emails could make your email to become a 'live' email and the spammers will send more emails to you because your email address is 'live'.

4. Update your anti-virus and scan your computer regularly to prevent trojan horses to use your email client to send spam.

18 Out Of 20 Emails Are Spam Emails

Barracuda Networks, a spam filtering service reported that 95% of all emails are spams and Symantec reported that 71% of all emails are spams. As you can see, the amount of spam is increasing every year. In 2001, only 5% of the emails are spams, but now it has increased 90% in 2007.

Spam emails are junk emails sent to numerous recipients for advertising or malicious purposes. Sometimes, spam emails contain viruses,worms, or trojan horse and it will infect your computer. Therefore, protecting your inbox from spam is important.

You will only lose your money if you buy the products that being advertise by spam. Remember one of my previous posts about buying from spam emails? You will never get the things that you buy from them.

These are some tips to protect yourself and your inbox from spam.

1. Never open any attachment from spam emails.
2. Use spam filtering software such as MailWasher or PopTray.
3. Never buy anything from spam emails.
4. Install anti-virus and firewall to prevent the trojan horses and viruses from infecting your system.

Weird Spam Emails Consist of Random Numbers and Letters as the Email Subject

Several days ago, I received a weird spam email. The email subject is so weird because the subject consists of random letters and numbers arrangement. Because it was so suspicious, I immediately deleted it.

However, the next day when I woke up, I received the same email in my inbox and there are 10 more emails of the same format except it all came from a different domain names and email address. I deleted all of it again.

But this does stop the spammer from sending more spam. The same type of email came to my inbox on the next day and it keeps coming until today. It's already been five days now and even though I already created a numerous email rules on PopTray, but PopTray cannot detect it as spam because the email subjects is contstantly changing but still in the same random numbers and letters format.

The subject is something like '?xbFhkd=?kdjuh' but longer. I'm not clear about this threat yet. But, it best for us to be careful to prevent something bad from happening. So, I'm posting this here to warn you about this email.

If you received this type of email in your inbox, delete it immediately. I'm going to try a different approach in dealing with this type of spam and if it works, I'll tell you.

CAPTCHA Images - How The Spammers Can Get Through It With Your Help

There is a new way on how the spammers can make you spam for them. Even though the target site is using CAPTCHA, the spammers can get through it with your help.

You might receive a message from a hot woman that willl ask you to enter CAPTCHA images numbers and she will strip for you after you've done it. Without you knowing, the CAPTCHA images are actually from the websites that the spammers want to attack.

Therefore, by entering the CAPTCHA images numbers and letters, you've helped the spammers to create a massive amount of email accounts from websites such as Yahoo!. Imagine if there are 1000 people are entering the numbers at the same time, the spammers can create 1000 email accounts by doing nothing!

This is just an example, they (spammers) might use it for other reasons. So, be careful if you received messages from unknown people.

I read this from PandaLabs. Here's the link
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/archive/A-new-way-of-social-engineering.aspx

Spam In MP3 Format?

Spam in MP3 format?

Will you believe if I say there are spams in MP3 format nowadays? I read it on PandaLabs blog. The MP3 will use different names to trick us into downloading it and after you've downloaded it, you will realize that it's not a song but an advertising MP3 instead.

It will use name such as oursong.mp3, and bartsimpson.mp3 to trick us. In order to avoid this type of spam, I suggest you to download songs only from the websites that you trust and remember to install McAfee Site Advisor. It will tells you which websites are spam websites.

Here's the direct link to the PandaLabs blog
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/archive/MP3-spam.aspx

Your opinion?

New Free Report - How To Secure Your Computer From Spyware, How To Filter Spam Using PopTray

I'm almost finish creating my new report for spyware protecion. It covers basic spyware protection knowledge and I'm going to make it available for free. I hope the report will help everyone who don't know a thing about spyware or knowledge on how to remove it.

Right now I'm just checking for grammar and spelling mistakes in this special report. I will give you guys the direct link for this report and you don't have to subscribe to my 5-day e-course to get it. However, my e-course subscribers will get a special security resource report in addition to this report and they will get it first before I post the link to this blog. In that report, they will find links to free firewalls, antiviruses,anti-spyware, spam blocking tools and so much more.

I'm not so sure when I will be able to finish this report because I will be very busy this week and next week. However, I will try to post useful tips everyday to this blog.

For today's tip, I'm going to share with you how PopTray managed to filter spam from my inbox.

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How To Filter Spam Using PopTray
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PopTray is a freeware where it will check for email messages in your inbox every 5 minutes. It also has 'rules' feature where it will be able to set rules for spam messages. Everytime you received spam emails, right click to the emails and you can choose either to add rule to email from sender or to add rule to email with subject.

The rules are mark message as spam or delete message. Therefore, everytime an email come with the same subject or from the same sender, it will automatically deleted or marked as spam for manual deletion.

It's actually a good program because you can filter your inbox from spam message automatically. Other than that, you can also preview the emails and it will show you the body and the raw message. This way, you can identify a phishing email because you can see where the link in the phishing email pointed to.

I strongly suggest you to download this freeware to improve your computer security.

P.S - If you would like to subscribe to my e-course, feel free to do so here http://www.chuangcomputer.com/5day

*Ebook cover design by Chaker Saaf

How The Hackers And The Spammers Can Get Your Email Address

Spam emails are problem to all of us. It's annoying and some spam emails even will send you malicious software. Another email threat is the hackers can hack into your email and they will demand you to pay some amount of money before they can release it to you. Maybe you're wondering how the heck the hackers or the spammers can get your email address. Below are some of the reasons.

1. You've posted your email address somewhere on the Internet
2. The hackers installed keyloggers inside your system
3. You've used your email username and password in other website (even the non-commercial websites)
4. Your password is not strong enough.
5. You've subscribed to spam websites
6. The hackers sent you a phishing email and you log-in through the link provided.
7. You posted your email as myemail@mydomain.com format

What you should do to prevent this from happening?

1. Don't post your email address in public forum or any websites
2. Scan your system using Ad-Aware 2007 and Spybot Search and Destroy
3. Don't use your email username and password in other websites
4. Use a strong password
5. Install McAffe Site Advisor to know which websites are spam websites
6. Never log-in using any link from any email
7. Post your email in other format such as myemail[at]mydomain.com . Spambots will have a problem catching your email address this way.
8. Use KeyScrambler and RoboForm to prevent keyloggers stealing your information

P.S - Would you like to learn more about creating a virtual wall around your computer? Subscribe to my 5 day PC security e-course http://www.chuangcomputer.com/5day

How To Identify Spam Just by Reading Them Once

Spam cam easily be identified once you understand some key elements of spam messages.

A real life example of a scam sent to my gmail account.

Dear Gmail customer,

From now if you need more than 2 GB of space use this invitation and upgrade your account to 100 GB of space also you can register one free domain name via this invitation your account upgrade will done after 24 hours

Your invitation code is : http://upgradegmail-CLICKSAFE.com/G....fakephisher (I edited link here so it is not clickbable)

Thank You
Gmail Support Department

You can easily understand it is spam just by reading the email. Gmail, Google company will also write email addressing you by your name. Dear Gmail customer, is a sign it is absolutely spam. Second all links should be on the Google domain. For example: Google.com/gmail and not http://upgradegmail-CLICKSAFE.com

Finally try to use more common sense. Gmail will not email you personally to give you an invitation code. If they have invitation codes they will probably put something new on their site to inform everyone.

These are most common types of scams everyone receives:

People selling you any type of

1) weight loss products.

2) love/romance/relationship related products.

3) making money, lottery winnings.

4) emails stating a friend send you a greeting card.

5) gambling/Pharmacy products.

General rule is never trust emails that are trying to sell you something or if you do not know who the sender really is. Does he or she call you by your name? The answer is no if it is spam.

These are all real scam emails, their subject lines (to get an idea):

Order Royal repl1ca w4tches Online

Neighbor sent you a postcard from BlueMountain.Com!

100mg x 90 pills htmlentities.78 per pill

Best Selection of Tag Heuer

URGENT: Earn 0 (net income) over and over again! But, act fast!

By the way, if you never opted in to receive such emails they are 110% fake emails. (spam or scam call them what you want, they should be ignored and deleted) If you never opted in for a weight loss newsletter, ezine or whatever than all weight loss related emails can be marked as spam.

Finally make use of a spam blocker cause they identify spam very fast. They save time and improve your security.

About the Author

A ton more tips from NoAdware blog. Check out the article to discover how to Download Myspace Backrounds now.

FAQs For Forum Spammers

Today, someone was spamming on Warrior Forum and there is a thread going on as of right now. One of the members, Michael Oksa created this interesting FAQs for forum spammers.

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Q: To be a good spammer should I put spaces between paragraphs?

A: No! Keep going as long as you can. There is also no reason to
have a grasp of English, or any other language.

Q: Should I add my affiliate link to the post or forum signature?

A: YES! It is also important to just leave it as is. Don't try to
disguise it by taking 5 minutes to learn how to make them text links.

Q: What is the best thing to do if people call me a spammer on the forum?

A: Easy! Call them names and accuse them of anything you can think of.
After all, you are the one spamming them, don't give them control.

Q: Are there any role models I can look up to in my spamming pursuits?

A: There is only one and their name is "n/a". Follow their lead and you
will do fine.

Q: Shouldn't I consult and/or follow the rules or terms of service for
any forums I plan on spamming?

A: No! Even though you likely agreed to them when you signed up using a
fake name, remember rules are always optional. And you don't have enough
time to read them when there's so many people who care about your message.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pretty nice sarcasm FAQs if you ask me, and funny too. All credits goes to Michael Oksa for creating this FAQs.

How To Locate Your Inbox Possible Spammer

I want to share you this one tip on how you can locate your inbox spammer. Actually it's not that hard. But, I cannot assure you that this will locate the spammer. Sometimes, you can only locate the zombies computer that the spammer use to send spam.

So, here's how:

1. After you've received the spam email in your inbox, first step is to report it to spamcop.net. Create an account with them and report the spam.

2. When you report the spam, you will have to paste the email header and the email body. Then, spamcop.net will process the email. After spamcop.net has done processing the email, you will see the sender IP address. It will say something like "possible spammer: (IP address of spammer)"

3. Copy the spammer IP address and go to http://www.ip-adress.com/iptracing/ and paste the IP address. You will see the IP location complete with a map showing the location.

Again, I cannot assure you that this method will find the spammer's location. Maybe you'll only find the zombies computer. I have received one spam email saying I've won a Yahoo lotteries.

What the heck? I haven't entered any lottery draw. Then I report the email to spamcop.net and find the IP location. I found the spammer is in Czech. Complete with the location.

So, next time you receive any spam emails and want to know who sent it, try this method.

How To Delete Spam Emails Before It Comes To Your Inbox

Spam is junk emails sent by the spammers to your inbox. Some companies paid the spammers to send emails for advertising purpose. Spam emails are so annoying and it's a waste of time.

In this post I will tell you how you can stop the spam emails before you download it to your inbox.

First of all, you need to download the PopTray freeware software. http://www.poptray.org/

This software was created by Renier Crause and it can delete messages before you download it into your email client. So, let's say you received an email and this software will notify you that you've received an email. Then, you right click on its icon on the taskbar and choose show messages.

You can preview the message before you download it. Therefore, if it's a spam email, you can mark it as a spam and delete it (or you can just delete it). It also has rules feature that you can customize. This feature will make the software to identify a message according to the rules that you've customized.

I totally love this software because I can delete the spams before downloading it and it will notify me for any new messages.

New Type of Virus Attack!

I just received an email today saying something like this:

"Good Day, dear Friend!

Want to see free porn films?
Use real-player in your attachment. Enjoy!

Best Regards."

This is a new type of trojan attack. So, if you received an email saying something like this, don't open the attachment. After I received this email, I reported it to spamcop.net so they can cut it right to the sources.