Spam has to be one of the most annoying things on the Internet. Clogging up your inbox with useless advertisements, with junk that you hardly would be interested in. What is more, it is unsolicited - that means you had not asked to be contacted by this spammer.
Then there is the Phishing and deceptive email. Pretending to be a bank, or any place where you may have your money. Making out that your account is about to be suspended or canceled if you don't update your details. They make out as if there has been a breach in security, and you must update your account within a set amount of time.
Once you go to the link provided by the phishing/deceptive email, you are taken to a site that acts and feels like the real thing (like the bank or organization you belong to), but in fact is just a front to their own site. Once you have entered your details, user name/account name, and password, to update your details, you may be given a confirmation screen message to say that all is OK . . but in actual fact, you have just given this spammer your login details, and with this information, he is able to empty your account of all your money!!!!
Report Phishing Emails
If ever you see a Phishing email in your Inbox, contact the organization of who the spammer is pretending to be. Do not use the links from the spammers email, this cannot be stressed enough!!! but go directly to a web browser and search for the organizations website.
You should as well contact any anti-phishing websites that look into this type of fraudulent emails. http://antiphishing.org/ the Anti-Phishing Workgroup's email reportphishing@antiphishing.org I would recommend highly that you forward any phishing emails you may receive to them so they may pursue the spammer.
Fraudulent Email, and Phishing email can also be reported to the FCE (Federal Trade Commission, Bureau of Consumer Protectionspam@uce.gov or by their website https://rn.ftc.gov/pls/dod/wsolcq$.startup. They will look into the Fraudulent or Deceptive email. The best way would be to simply forward the email (as an attachment) to the FCE.
You may also use the AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT's website for reporting spam, http://www.spam.acma.gov.au. Sign up and download their tool for OUTLOOK or OUTLOOK Express, and with one click, you can report spam. Please browse to their site, as they have interesting information in regard to spam, and what the Australian Government are doing to fight spam.
REPORT SPAM
One of the best ways to report a spammer, is to use SPAMCOP, http://spamcop.net. It is free to report, and once you have processed your spam from their website, the Network Administrators for both the Website that was referenced in the spam, and the Network Administrator for the Email Server that was used to send the spam will be notified. Spamcop puts it into report form, so the administrators can identify the person responsible for sending the spam.
When it comes to the Service Agreements for both Emails and Websites, Hosting companies (ie, Yahoo or India Servers), have a zero tolerance on spam.
When you report the spam and process it via Spamcop, Spamcop will report the IP address of the spammer to the Server where the email or website originates, and, hopefully if all things are perfect, their accounts will be terminated or suspended.
The idea here is, if everyone begins to report the spam . . then the spammers will be hounded until they have no more Servers (for email or websites) that they can use. It will become to annoying for them to keep having to set up new accounts and new websites, that eventually they will just give up on sending spam, as their time and effort will not be worth what little reward they may attain from spam.
Get FREE Spam Filers for your system:
If you are looking for a filter for your system to flag spams arriving into your mailbox, I would recommend SPAMPAL. It will lable any spams it find with **SPAM** where, you can make a rule in your email client, where if it finds any emails with **SPAM** in it, then it is to redirect the email to the trash (delete).
It is fully configurable, so, if an email is wrongly labled, you can tell SpamPal to white list the email, so it will ignore the next time it sees the address.
I highly recommend Clamwin Antivirus. IT is 100% free to download and there is no cost to use the Antivirus. IT is a full antivirus program, not a trial, so it does not expire. Please check out their site with the above link.
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