Commercial spam, phishing, unsolicited advertisements, and scams inundate email inboxes every day. Spam filters try hard to keep up, but the truth is, even with the very best spam filtering and blockers, you will still end up with some unwanted email in your inbox, and legitimate emails you did want will be lost forever. This is going to continue, as long as people still purchase, click, or sign up for things received through unsolicited emails.
The spammers aren’t stupid – you may think that everyone knows how spam works and that people aren’t really buying things from spammers, but if a spammer sends out 10,000 emails and only 1% click or respond, they’re still getting 100 sales or responses – and for what? For about 1 minute worth of work to click on the automated sending software they have, and about another minute worth of work to harvest email addresses from anywhere they can find them. As long as people still click or buy, the spam will continue.
So the response from the consumer to stop this type of advertising, which is not regulated by fair trade practices, required of other advertisers in the United States, companies like EveryCloud have developed and adapted against new spam techniques and provide spam filtering software to help you have better control over your inbox.
Spammers alter headers, so that the emails look as though they come from legitimate domains, and from real people. In fact, if you respond to many of these emails, you find that your response will be sent back to the faked address, and a real person, at a real email address, will receive your email – but they never sent anything to you.
What this has done has resulted in legitimate businesses having their domains and IPs blocked from many major ISP and email providers, when, in fact, they have done nothing wrong. Additionally, if you blacklist them in your spam filtering software, you can never receive messages from them again. Now, for a regular Internet user, this poses a very little problem, because chances are you will never have a need to receive an email from many of these domains and email addresses that were spoofed.
Consumers and businesses alike are suffering due to this spam. The cost to businesses is hard to determine, but there is a financial loss due to spam that results in rising costs of products and services to consumers. There is only one way to stop the spammers in their tracks – be educated! Never, ever click on, purchase anything, or sign up for anything that comes from an unsolicited spam – ever! Why do the spams and scams work? Because consumers still fall for them, every day, thousands of them. The only way to stop spam is to make it unprofitable for people to spam.
As long as consumers remain ignorant of these scam and spam tactics, the spammers will continue to get rich, for doing very little work, and our inboxes will continue to be besieged by an influx of unwanted, vulgar, unsolicited, or phishing emails.
Lastly, a word of warning – some spam, especially phishing spam, is dangerous. Never, ever click on a link in an unsolicited email and then provide any personal or financial or password information. If the email appears to have come from eBay, PayPal, your bank, or any other place, even if it’s a place you recognize and do business with, never click the link on the email. Always open a new browser window and go directly to the site through your browser and verify whatever the email said that way. If still unsure, do not respond to the email you received. Instead, email the company you do business with, and ask them directly or forward them a copy of the email to see if it’s legitimate.
Once again, spam and scams and phishing won’t stop until the consumer and end user stops giving them ways to be profitable. Be knowledgeable, get a reliable spam filtering provider, protect your personal information, and never support a spammer by clicking, signing up, or purchasing anything from an unsolicited email – ever.
