It’s hard to acknowledge that the first email ever sent happened almost 50 years ago. Seven years later, the first known ‘spam’ email was sent to several hundred users, by a man who worked for Digital Computer Corp. The email sent was an open invite to the company that were showcasing their new VAX computer. Recipients were not so happy with the random invite! Luckily he stopped, but since then, there’s been a long and ongoing battle against spammers, but there is a lot we can do to prevent it.
According to Statista, spam messages accounted for 55% of e-mail traffic last year. Despite its ubiquity, the global e-mail spam rate has been decreasing, down from 69% in 2012. Spammers work on behalf of online merchants and send out millions of messages trying to reach as many people as possible to click on a link in the email.
Your email software almost certainly filters spam, moving unwanted messages to a separate folder. But it’s not perfect and sometimes we receive these emails in our inbox. And there are times when our legitimate messages, end up in the spam folder.
Don’t open junk email
Use, at least, two different email addresses
Tricks to mislead email search engines
Spammers use search engines to locate emails published on websites, lists, social media forums, etc. Publishing your email address on your website is a sure-fire way of attracting unwanted emails. If you need to publish your email address online, use a secondary email address that has been set up to receive this un-wanted spam.
Enable Antivirus from the control panel
From the settings panel on your device, you can enable antivirus and the filters will then move all suspicious email to the junk folder. With BullGuard Internet Security you will increase the accuracy of detecting spam e-mails and identifying legitimate e-mails with the SpamFilter. This includes phishing attempts, viruses spreading and foreign language spam. You can also customize filters to block email you don’t want to receive.