Tom's Blog - Sick of Spam

Tom warns of the dangers of spam and why you shouldn’t believe the tall stories that drop into your inbox.

One of my friends has almost 1500 unread emails in his inbox. Unbelievably, more than 1000 of them are spam.

I was recently sent a spam email warning me that if I didn’t forward it on to 24 other people in 900 seconds, then I would die...

Scary, hey? This email, like a lot of spam, works by putting fear into the reader by hinting that something bad could happen to them or their family if they don’t send the email on to other people – hence, compelling them to do so.

The thing is, the bad stuff never actually happens because the emails are spam! They aren’t real! Even though sometimes the stories in spam emails sound plausible, the fact that they encourage you to forward them on, especially with details of how many people to send them to and how quickly you have to do it, means they are definitely fake. No genuine emails with strange stories will ever ask you to do this.

Two common spam emails are those that say you’ve won the Irish (or some other country’s) lottery and those that request your bank account details from poor people from places across the world.

You’ve probably been sent some of these before, and it’s safe to say that all of these emails are completely fake. And when you do get them, you can take action. How? By right clicking on them (in your Hotmail account) and selecting “Junk”.

You can be sent spam by unknowingly giving websites access to your accounts. When registering, some websites may ask for your Hotmail username and password and also for your contact list.

Never give this info out as the people behind the spam will then go through your contacts and send spam to them as well.

Spam can also be spread by hackers trying millions of random email addresses in the hope of finding a few accurate ones to send spam to. Hackers and spammers can also send spam by faking the address that an email comes from – making it look like it’s from someone you might know. I could send emails out looking like they’ve come from the Prime Minister of Australia!

So, can spam be stopped? The simple answer is yes – there are some things that you can do. In Hotmail, you can go to “Options” and “More Options” then set your “Junk Email Filter and Reporting” to standard. This will use Hotmail’s own detector to identify and put junk emails into their own folder. You should also set your email account to “Report Junk Messages” so the account will know when spam is sent through in the future.

This will automatically delete the spam after 10 days, but occasionally it may put legitimate emails in there as well, so it’s a good idea to check regularly, just in case.

Remember, spam only exists because it works – people still get trapped into believing it and opening it.

So the best way to stop it is simple: never open it! Instead, you should delete and report it. This undermines the whole point of spam and ultimately, hackers will stop sending it once they realise that we’re not falling for their stories anymore.

How do you deal with spam? Share your thoughts on the comments board below!