It’s a part of online life. Once, spam just referred to a tinned spiced ham, but now electronic spam, – the sending of bulk unsolicited electronic messages, as it’s described by Wikipedia, has unfortunately became part of our everyday vocabulary. As the internet evolves, so does spam, and schemes are getting harder and harder to spot.
Email spam is one of the most common, and most, if not all, email providers have built in spam filters. The screen shot below shows just a few of the 302 spam emails my gmail filter has caught in the last week. Pharmacy and weight loss products, software, competitions and more abound. I’ve never researched this in depth but I’m assuming some emails are spam – as in advertising genuine products, where if you were to respond, you may actually receive whatever you paid for. Others are likely to be scams – promising products but once payment was received, you may well never be able to track the product – or them.
Some messages in the spam folder may actually be emails you have signed up to receive. The final email in the screenshot above is from mila.com – this is a new app for which I have registered, but the manner in which they are sending their enewsletters and updates means it’s being sent to my spam folder by gmail.
So I’d recommend scanning your spam folder every so often, and marking the emails you WANT to receive as “not spam” and usually you will have an option to put the sender on your “safe list” so you do receive those in the future.
Zestee 