In
last couple of years, spam mail has become perhaps most terrible headache of email users on internet. Depending on how popular your mail service provider is and how old your email account is, you may be receiving every day ten to several hundred unwanted emails about advertisements, propaganda, news and a bunch of other topics that you did not and most probably will never ask for in future. Mail service providers have developed some protection systems to reduce this discomfort their customers are experiencing, such as filters, but sometimes spam attacks can even get past these barriers. Even if these barriers are effective, all those spam mails produce annoying heaps in junk mail folders just to take up your mail account's precious storage space.As mail services offering large storage spaces are becoming widespread this year, people are moving to these new accounts and creating their new addresses. Unfortunately, it hasn't been a couple of months since most famous of these email services, Gmail, has started giving out accounts by invitations and word has already gotten around that spam attacks have discovered these new fresh targets as well. Although number of these attacks is low at moment, it will surely increase and may reach a threat-posing amount in a short period of time.
No matter how well spam filters are, us email users cannot be fully protected from spam today, but we can still take some precautions to evade these attacks, while registering for new accounts and after. Some crucial tips to avoid spam may be listed as follows:
1. While you're creating an account, do not choose a short username. You will receive spam mail due to dictionary attacks. For example, think of username "angel". Each address starting with word "angel" will receive a spam mail: angel@ angels@ angelic@ angelica@ angelina@ ...
2. Since usernames that are to be attacked are generated from first few letters, it's better to start username with letter or number series without a meaning: Example: ytgkj.username@ or 72149.username@
3. It's always better to use special characters in user name if they are allowed. Example: user-name@, user_name@ or user.name@
4. If you are sure that it's a spam mail, do NOT click links like "Click to unsubscribe, remove your address from list" and do NOT reply them with emails having subjects like "Remove", "Unsubscribe" etc. These will verify your email address and will only make your address receive more of them.
