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Article Directory :: Computers & Technology Articles
Email spam is one of the greatest daily annoyances in our lives today. It seems like each time you log into your email, there are more unsolicited messages waiting for you that legitimate ones.
Did you know that spam email could be more than just annoying? It can be downright dangerous to your financial and personal identity. Today, email spam is the number one method used by cyber-criminals to steal your Internet passwords, bank account and credit card data and much more.
How do they do this? It's quite simple really. The spam messages they send are called phishing emails. These messages often look like legitimate emails from merchants you do business with. It could be your bank, your school, a credit card company or some other website.
In the message, the cyber-criminal will state that you need to verify your account information. The email will include a link and it will look and feel like the real site. The problem is that it is not. The website they send you to is nothing more than a data-harvesting website where they attempt to get you to outright give them your bank account numbers, social security number, credit card number, website passwords and other sensitive data.
How can you prevent this from happening to you? One simple step is to use spam filtering or blocking software in your email inbox. In the next few paragraphs, we are going to discuss a few options for free anti-spam software programs and other applications that attempt to stop spam for free.
The first option is to use Google's GMail, Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo Mail as your email client. These big corporations spend millions each year developing anti-spam technology and it comes free with your email address. All three of these providers offer POP3 email functionality, which means you can download other email into your webmail and use the spam filtering software to weed out spam messages, phishing emails and other unwanted mail.
If you prefer to use a POP3 email client on your computer, such as Outlook, Eudora or Windows Mail, you may want to consider a program like SpamFighter, POPFile or SpamPal. These are just a few examples.
These programs attach onto your email client and test each email that arrives in your email box. Questionable emails are normally delegated to a spam folder and outright dangerous emails can be deleted automatically if you choose.
These programs rely on blacklist data and other algorithms to determine which emails are spam and which ones are not. If the program flags a legitimate message as spam, you can setup an exception (or rule) and it will no longer flag the messages from the send as spam in the future.
Although today there is no perfect spam prevention or anti-spam software on the market, using the techniques outlined here will go a long way in cutting down on the number of spam messages in your inbox each day.
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More articles by Chad Kiser
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