Signs of Phising

Phising is a scam which works by impersonating banks or other financial organisations like Paypal or Moneybookers. Most of the time the scammers send you emails which seem to be coming from such online sites. They ask you for your personal details like account number, credit card number or some other identity which can let them get into your account.

Such emails have links which you are asked to click to go the site. Now when you click you are taken to a website which looks genuine but as soon as you submit your personal information, the scammer will use it to access your account and clean it out.

So what to do if you get such emails?
The best way is to ignore them and mark them as spam so that your email client will send it the spam box and will hopefully prevent another such email to get into your inbox. However, the thing to keep in mind is never to click on the links in the emails.

First of all no banking or online payment sites will ask for your information by email Paypal has a clear warning about such email fraud on their websites. This is a sure sign that this site is fraudulent.

However if you do feel that you have to check with the website, type its url in the browser and then check if the security lock icon is shown in the bottom bar of your browser. Also see that such websites have https instead of http in their url which a sign of security of the website.

How To Keep Out Spam

If you use email, then you are sure getting spam emails, those emails you don't want. Now there is a law against sending emails but still the spam gets in to your inboxes.

So is there a way to keep spam out of your emails?

Here are a few suggestions that would help you to fight spam effectively:

Do what you can to avoid having your email address out on the net.

There are products called “spam spiders” that search the Internet for email addresses to send email to. If you are interested, do a search on “spam spider” and you will be amazed at what you get back. Interestingly, there is a site, WebPoison.org, which is an open source project geared to fight Internet "spambots" and "spam spiders", by giving them bogus HTML web pages, which contain bogus email addresses.

A few suggestions for you:

• Use form emails, which can hide addresses or also

• Use addresses like sales@company.com instead of your full address to help battle the problem.

• There are also programs that encode your email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email address on web pages so that while spam spiders find it difficult or impossible to read your email address.

Get a spam blocking software.

There are many programs out there for this. (Go to www.cloudmark.com or www.mailwasher.net for example). You may also buy a professional version. Whatever you do, get the software. It will save you time. The software is not foolproof, but they really do help. You usually have to do some manual set up to block certain types of email.

Use the multiple email address approach.

There are a lot of free email addresses to be had. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then have a “back-up” email address. It would be like giving your sell phone number to your best friends and the business number to everyone else.

Attachments from people you don’t know are NO, NO

A common problem with spam is that they have attachments and attachments can have viruses. Corporations often have filters that don’t let such things pass to you. Personal email is far more “open country” for spamers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who is sending you something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service as well.

Email services now have “bulk-mail” baskets.

If what you use currently does not support this, think about moving to a new email client like yahoo.com. The concept is simple. If you know someone, they can send you emails. If you don’t know them, put them in the bulk email pile and then “choose” to allow them into your circle. Spam Blocking software has this concept as well, but having extra layers seems critical these days, so it is worth looking into.

All these precautions should help you to keep the spam out to a great extent.