Do Not Open Spam Emails!
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You may have heard, probably time and time again, not to open emails from people you don’t know. You’re given this warning every time a particularly bad virus is making the rounds. But many people have the misconception that if they have an anti-virus program, use web mail, or other safer operating systems like Mac OS X it’s ok to open everything. The truth is it’s never safe!
The biggest problem of late is not so much viruses, but spam emails that include images. When these emails are opened the images load from a spammers server and report to the spammer that your email address is valid. The spammers sell lists of verified email addresses to other spammers for quick cash and you’ll soon be swamped with even more spam!
While this is nothing new, its use has become very wide spread. Almost all spam today includes this verification technology so it’s very important that you delete any emails that appear to be from spammers instead of opening them or viewing them in the preview pane.
Tags: email, spam, pictures, images, web bugs, bug, spammers
One Comment
Cygnostik
September 5th, 2007
at 1:38pm
That’s actually not entirely true, inaccurate in fact. Not only is image spam declining somewhat- the purpose has been to get around spam filtering. The images are also usually an attachment so the image comes in with the email and is not pulled from a spammers server which would get shut down very quickly anyway.
In addition the technology to tie a web server hit to an email address isn’t that simple and is not commonly used. I’ve been in IT, Email Abuse & Web Hosting for going on a decade - I’ve been very involved in spam (in all aspects but actually being a spammer) for a long time and I don’t recall ever seeing such specific data as an email address being recorded by viewing an image.
Remote images as opposed to attached images are very problematic and will typically be blocked even when you open the message.