Protect Yourself from Email Trash

When marketers find out that you have a new baby, free samples, coupons, and other offers start pouring in your mailbox. Similarly, new website owners can find their online mailbox stuffed with offers. The difference is that at least some of the baby stuff is useful, while the online stuff is not.

How it happens

When you have a website that contains your email address, it is publicly visible. Automated systems crawl the web and collect these addresses. Because the addresses are guaranteed to be good, they are sold to spammers and hackers for top dollar. The result is, your email box becomes a target for spam, scams, and viruses.

Spam

In addition to the usual junk (pharmaceutical, money-, and sex-related offers) you'll get requests for links to other websites in exchange for links to yours. To many people this seems like a good idea because search engines have used the number of links pointing to your site as one of their ranking criteria.

However, the only time you should consider doing this is if a) you know the sender and b) it seems reasonable that you may get prospects from a link on their site. For example, a realtor and mortgage broker would be good link partners as would an author and a publisher.

If you don't know the sender, you are courting trouble. Many of these spammers are running link farms (websites that do nothing but link to others). Search engines consider link farms as ways of "cheating" to get higher rankings and penalize sites that are connected to them. Similarly, search engines no longer typically give higher rankings to sites with lots of unrelated links. As a general rule, don't link promiscuously: if people wouldn't reasonably click on a link from or to your site, there is no reason to have it.

Scams

In addition to more obvious scams like foreign heads of state looking for Americans with bank accounts, a more insidious scam named "phishing" has been growing in popularity. When phishing, a scammer creates an email that appears to be from a legitimate source (Best Buy, EBay, and several banks have already been targets). The email typically states that some computer-related problem has occurred and requests that you send them information including your account number and password. The email can look quite realistic, containing the business' logo, colors, and brand appearance. Never, ever reply to any such email. Email is not secure--no legitimate business would ever ask you to send them personal information this way.

Viruses

Some of what looks like spam are actually viruses. Viruses can seriously damage your computer and compromise your security. I occasionally run across advice stating that you can protect yourself from viruses simply by not opening emails from people you don't know. This is dangerously untrue. Many viruses infect new computers by sending copies of themselves via email to everyone in an infected person's address book. So, it's actually common to be infected by someone you know (just like in the real world).

What you can do

1) Keep the trash from getting into your inbox. Check with your email provider to see if they have anti-spam software that will screen out spam for you.

2) Filter out the trash. You can purchase a program that filters out spam automatically and/or create your own spam filters (most email programs have this capability).

3) Install a virus protection program on your computer and make sure it stays up to date. Remember, you are not only protecting your own computer, you are protecting others that you are connected to.

4) Never reply to a spammer. Email addresses that reply to spam are worth even more than simply real ones. Even if the spam comes from a legitimate business, by replying you are only encouraging them to spam others.

Trash email can be difficult, if not impossible, to trace to it's source and is frequently not punishable by law. Until technical and legal solutions to these problems are implemented, email trash is not going to go away. The best you can do is keep yourself safe and keep the time you spend sorting through it to a minimum.