Why you receive spam?

Many startup businesses simply do not believe in normal growth to their businesses. They do not collect e-mails lawfully. By using e-mail harvesting tools, they collect anonymous e-mails from any website and start sending mailshots to them. Also, mailshot marketers get money from companies to send arbitrary ads. The worst type of spam is the scam.

Spam Vs Scam

Spam is any e-mail sent to you without subscribing to the sender’s mail list. Scam is an e-mail sent to you with the purpose of deceiving you to get your money or property, normally, by mimicking a public figure and directing the victim through steps that will end up by the victim sending the scammers some money to free a larger amount of money.

Your e-mail inbox becomes like a trash can

Normally, after a while of creating your e-mail and using it in many websites you will start to receive spams and scams after your e-mail becomes at the hands of arbitrary e-mail harvesters.

What web developers should do to prevent e-mail harvesting?

Developers should hide e-mails or use Captcha to view e-mails to limit automatic harvesting. Harvesting tools are now very smart; they can identify e-mails written like this: someone [at] some-domain.com.

Pull the trigger and click SPAM

If you receive any spam or scam, just report it as a spam and this will be enough to punish abusers.

For example, MailChimp.com which is used to send mailshots will suspend the spammers account if a threshold was exceeded and they state that:

Most ESPs and ISPs say a reasonable threshold for abuse complaints is 0.1 percent which means 1 out of every 1,000 people reported a campaign as junk

MailChimp.com added that because their IP’s are shared among multiple users, the threshold is stricter than that because ISP’s will block their IP’s or domains if they do not suspend abusers accounts and investigate the matter.

Reporting an e-mail as spam or scam will finally end up with blacklisting the IP and/or the domain used to send the suspicious e-mail. This will cost the abusers lots of money and efforts to remove the blacklisting.

 Conclusion

If you have ever received a spam or scam e-mail, do not belittle the SPAM button, it will make an earthquake to the abuser account, IP and domain. Click the report SPAM button and say: “bang!”

Below is how to report a spam or scam using Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, respectively.