We’ve all heard of the dreaded spammers on the web, whether they’re launching unwanted pop ups when you visit sites or because they’ve wormed their way into your computer and periodically display adverts on your screen. We love to hate them! The most prolific spammers appear to relish the opportunity of bringing your email accounts to a grinding halt in the hope that one unfortunate individual will click "read" instead of "delete" so they can worm their way into your life forever.
I appear to have been fortunate and feel fairly confident that if they get past my junk mail inbox, that I can spot spam in advance and delete them before they get to do any harm, well, until recently anyway.
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Having recently launched my own humble and small information website called http://lottosystems.info. I have found that my needs have changed and my contact list has grown, with many individuals that I don’t know appearing frequently in my inbox to ask me questions or offer me advice. The difficulty for me now is identifying which of those emails is indeed
spam prior to opening them.
I have had
two spamming experiences in the last couple of weeks which I thought you may be interested in sharing and perhaps even offering up some of your own advice for me?
Firstly, over months, perhaps even years, I have grown accustomed to the obvious "Your Aunt has left you Millions" and "Your Bank need to urgently verify your online banking password due to a proliferation of recent hacking ... please type it here!" I can’t help but smile whilst typing that one. But I guess some unfortunate individual somewhere must have fallen for it, otherwise they wouldn’t keep sending it out. "Our Nigerian Prime Minister urgently needs to leave the country and needs you to look after his money for him…". Oh really, I was only chatting to him the other day, strange how he didn’t mention it! The fairy stories are never ending aren’t they?
But, in the last couple of weeks I have had two more interesting pieces of spam. Vista Print, FREE business cards, just pay the P & P. ”Hang on a minute" I thought, I’ve heard of that business. Finger twitches and click, within seconds I found myself ordering calling cards for my website and within days I had them. How did they do that? I never considered buying any business cards, but they got me whilst I was updating my website and I just couldn’t resist, the point being that I was actually quite happy I opened this unsolicited bit of
spam, albeit it cost me money and I am surprised to find that the product arrived as described, at the price quoted, exactly what I ordered, to the specification as laid out on their site. Excellent! Maybe
spam isn’t so bad at all ...
Next
email, "Your cousin … (+ her correct full name) has been urgently trying to reach you, please contact her ASAP". So, you might think well that sounds safe, doesn’t it? The name actually matches one of my cousins in Australia whom I haven’t heard from in years, and I know one other person of the same name in France, whom I jokingly call "Cous" due to the fact we share the same very rare surname and probably do originate from the same blood stock!
I would go as far as to say that I was more confident about opening this email than I had for that of Vista Print, and didn’t for a moment believe it to be
spam; So, I clicked on the link to open the email and "Hey Presto" I was immediately inundated with pop ups that I appeared faster than I could close them.
The morale of the
spamming story? Well, let’s just say that I have had it sorted now. Whilst I received several similar
spam emails within days, it only needed to catch me out once for the
spammers to have achieved the required disruption and purpose of their
spamming.
Do I love to hate it? Having lowered my defences for what seemed like moments, yes I certainly do!