Category Archives: Anti-spam

Secure Yourself from Phishing Emails

Posted on by

what-is-a-phishing-scam-136394107163503901-141103122830

In this article we would like to highlight some key points regarding email security and phishing scams.

First of all, what is phishing? Email messages that are trying to get your personal information are called phishing scams. Usually this kind of messages lead you to the fraudulent websites using links included in the message. The website itself is intended to collect your username, email address, password, credit card detail etc.

According to Symantec threat report, the reported number of exposed identities jumped to 429 million in 2015. Since phishing is considered to be one the most devious form of identity theft, it is important for your to become familiar with the various types of phishing scams as well as to learn how to be protected from them. We gathered the most useful and powerful tips on how to beat phishing messages:

1. Do not click on the links, download files and attachments from unknown and suspicious senders. If you think the link is strange and doubtful, probably it is so. Never go to your bank’s website by clicking on links included in emails.
2. Do not reply to suspicious messages with providing your personal data (passwords, credit card details, etc.) to the sender. You never know who is behind the “sender” field. When you really need to share your information it is better to use secure website or just call the person than using an email to provide passwords.
3. Change your accounts’ passwords and check you bank account status regularly. Some companies have a policy rule to change account’s password regularly and use only hard to guess ones. Why don’t get such a rule for yourself?
4. One of the best options (that you are probably already using) is Spamdrain filter. Every week Spamster stops like 4-5 million spam messages with viruses, blank senders, etc. (and that’s even without newsletters). Our spam filters analyze every little detail from the sender field to the links in the message and our Spamster works hard to keep our customers satisfied. He is always on guard of your email address from phishing emails.

Well, it’s time to go and keep your Inbox free from phishing emails.
Thanks for reading!

How to: Unsubscribe from Newsletters

Posted on by

Newsletters and other promotional emails cannot be called “spam” technically, as they are from legitimate organizations but sometimes they get annoying. In this article, we will try to help you get rid of such unwanted messages.
The very first tip is to think twice before giving your email address to online forums and guest books and of course any suspicious websites. If you already do so, you can close this article and enjoy your free-from-spam Inbox.
However, it is very easy to get into some distributional newsletter list even if you did not intend to. It’s a common practise to provide unsubscribe link in every legitimate newsletter. Usually, desirable link is hidden at the bottom of the email message. You might want to try the following steps to free your inbox from unwanted newsletter once and forever:

 
1. Open a newsletter message;
2. Find the Unsubscribe link and click on it. Sometimes it can be hard to find the needed link because newsletter senders do not want to lose their audience. You can resolve this little issue using a search option in the webmail client (to speed things up you can press Ctrl+F) and type “Unsubscribe” in the search field. Here it is! Usually, clicking on the link redirects you to the source website and asks to confirm your decision;
NOTE: If you use some email application, the combination of the “Search” hot keys might be different, e.g. Outlook will respond to Ctrl+E to run the search.
3. Finally, you see something like: We have removed your email address from our list. What a relief! This might be not the end of the story though. Sometimes, it is required to go through several steps before you finally see that you are unsubscribed.

Keep in mind, the guide applies to legitimate email newsletters (like Linkedin, Twitter etc.). Spam newsletters are not so easy to deal with. It’s typical for spam newsletters to lead your email address to more spam lists (and this is definitely not the unsubscribe process). This is where Spamdrain comes in handy. Newsletter filter is enabled at your Spamdrain account by default. Now, using Spamdrain newsletter filter, spam newsletters are not a problem anymore.

You can find more information here.

Hopefully, now you will be much more confident in security of your email address in terms of spam newsletters.

Feel free to leave likes and comments! We will be more than glad to hear your ideas for our next HOW TO articles.

Email Address Construction

Posted on by
Today Spamster is offering you some interesting facts about email address and a few funny names for @ sign.
An email address consists of three parts:
at_sign-svg
1) Local Part
Local part consists of up to 64 characters and is chosen by the email account owner or administrator.

2) Domain part
Could be custom domain, company, organization providing the email service, ISP provider. The domain name part of an email address has to conform to strict guidelines: it must match the requirements for a hostname, a list of dot-separated DNS labels, each label being limited to a length of 63 characters.

3) “At” sign
Officially, this symbol is called commercial at. Unofficially, most people seem to refer to it as the at sign or just at. Recently, there has also been a movement to call it the “atmark”. There are also numerous nicknames for it, including snail, curl, strudel, whorl, and whirlpool.

Here are some quirky names for the @ symbol in different countries:
apenstaartje – Dutch for “monkey’s tail”
snabel – Danish for “elephant’s trunk”
kissanhnta – Finnish for “cat’s tail”
klammeraffe – German for “hanging monkey”
papaki – Greek for “little duck”
kukac – Hungarian for “worm”
dalphaengi – Korean for “snail”
grisehale – Norwegian for “pig’s tail”
sobachka – Ukrainian for “little dog”

We believe that there are more funny names for @ sign than gathered above. Tell us how @ sign is called in your country or probably your own nickname for it.
Looking forward to your comments.

5 Amazing Facts About Email

Posted on by

Check out these amazing facts about email. Probably, you have not heard about all of them
1. First email message celebrates its 45th anniversary this month. In October 1971 first email message was sent between two computers placed next to each other. Thank you Ray Tomlinson for the first email program on the ARPANET system!

2. Do you know where the word “spam” came from? It is named for canned meat product that was introduced in 1937. The word spam became popular in 1970 because of BBC comedy sketch Monty Python. The name of meat product was mentioned 108 times in that sketch. You can check it here

3. Do you have one of the most common passwords? We hope you don’t, but to make sure just have a look at the top 10 most used passwords:

123456
password
1234578
qwerty
12345
123456789
football
1234
1234567
baseball
welcome
4. According to a Radicati Group study from February 2015, there are about 2.5 billion email users in the world. In May 2009, Radicati Group made a research that there are about 1.9 billion email users worldwide. As for 2019, they project nearly 2.9 billion email users all over the world.

5. Just a few numbers that show how common the spam problem is:
Average office worker receives 121 emails a day:
– Percentage of email that is spam: 49.7%
– Percentage of emails that have a malicious attachment: 2.3%

We hope you enjoyed the article. As always, feel free to comment and share with friends
Yours,
Spamdrain Team

5 things you did not know about Spamdrain

Posted on by
Do you know that there are a few hidden tips at Spamdrain? Well, actually, they are not hidden, but just easy to miss. Here are some hints that can make your friendship with our Spamster even stronger. Check out below:

1. There are two lists where you can put email addresses: Whitelist and Blacklist. As you can guess from the names, there is a possibility to add unwanted email addresses to the blacklist and forbid some annoying spammers to get into your inbox. With the whitelist you can let your favorite email addresses get into your Inbox without any obstacles.

2. Sharing our services is cool! Yes, of course, you have seen that you can provide a friend with a link from here and get free months. But did you know that four recommendations to the friends with one email address will give you one year of free filtering of one email address? Don’t miss this opportunity and check it right now!

3. Our Spamster is so cool that once people saw him on the main page, they do not scroll down to explore for more. At the bottom of the main page you can see that we have pages at social media networks:
you-should-follow-us

4. Email lists filter. There is a possibility to filter messages depending on their type in the allowed and blocked lists:

1-allowed-filtered-list 1-blocked-filtered-list

5. Do you know what’s making our Spamster happy? Each added email address! It is a little step to the world full of clean Inboxes!

5 tips on how to write an email effectively

Posted on by

Here are the most common tips that our spamster has gathered for his users:

1) Specify the subject field
Always clarify the subject with the words related to the message. Try to put the subject line that will describe the content of the entire letter. Never leave the subject line empty. Using the words like: attention, important, discount etc., could lead your message to the spam folder and there is a chance your message will never reach its recipients.

2) Sign your letters
Signature in a courteous manner shows your attitude to the recipient. Do not forget to add to your signature words like sincerely, regards or just BR. As an option, create a signature in your email client and it will be added at the end of the letter automatically.

3) Respond promptly
I guess, everyone had a situation waiting for an email reply for too long. Therefore, there is no need to make other people waiting. Even replying with something like: “Unfortunately busy at the moment, will reply tomorrow” will let the sender know that you are aware of the message.

4) CC or BCC ?
If you’d like to share your message with other recepients, besides the primary addressee, you can use CC or BCC fields. The abbreviation CC indicates those who are to receive a copy of an e-mail addressed to another person. The list of receipients in CC is shown for all other recepients of the message. BCC field, on the contrary, is available for hidden notification, not visible to any other receivers (including those in BCC). Indicating that you are adding a new participant to the list of recievers is considered a good practice.

 
5) Email address can be hacked
Do not send your passwords, confidential information, personal information etc. via email. Remember to update your email password regularly and with the secure, hard to guess password.

I hope those tips will be useful before clicking on send 🙂
Sincerely yours,
Spamdrain’s spamster

POP3 and IMAP: basics and differences

Posted on by

Spamdrain filtering supports two type of connections: IMAP and POP3.

POP3 is an internet protocol to retrieve email. Email messages are delivered and stored on your personal computer, mobile device or any other tablet or phone. When you check e-mail, read it, it is downloaded it to your computer and immediately deleted from the server. This means that read e-mail on the computer will not be accessible on the phone.
IMAP on the other hand saves and stores all your e-mail messages on the server. The advantage of IMAP access is that you can check and send e-mails on multiple devices because you always interact with a mail server and not just one device. IMAP protocol is better and more modern than POP3 protocol. Using IMAP connection allows you to store emails on the server and always have access to them (with the internet connection of course ). There is also an advantage of POP3 connection: you can read e-mails even when you are offline.

Each of these protocols provides secure and non-encrypted ports:

Port 995 – this is the default port to use in order to connect using POP3 securely     Port 110 – this is the default POP3 non-encrypted port

Port 993 – this is the default port to use in order to connect using IMAP securely     Port 143 – this is the default IMAP non-encrypted port

Those settings at Spamdrain could be changed here:

https://spamdrain.com/en/app.html#/settings

Our Inbox is clean from Spam, hope yours is too 🙂

Email Dictionary: Glossary of Terms You Should Know, Part 2

Posted on by
Here is the second part of the most common words in email domain that you should be aware of while using email services. 
Email client: The software that recipients use to read email. Some email clients have better support for HTML email than others.
Email header: The section of an email message that contains the sender’s and recipient’s email addresses as well as the routing information.
Email marketing: The use of email (or email lists) to plan and deliver permission-based marketing campaigns.
False positive: A legitimate email message that is mistakenly rejected or filtered by a spam filter.
HTML: HyperText Markup Language – The most commonly used coding language for creating Web pages. HTML can also be used in email messages.
IMAP: Internet Message Access Protocol – A protocol used to retrieve email messages. Most email clients use either the IMAP or the POP protocol.
IP address: An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique identifier for a computer on the Internet. It is written as four numbers separated by periods. Each number can range from 0 to 255. Before connecting to a computer over the Internet, a Domain Name Server translates the domain name into its corresponding IP address.
MIME: Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions – An extension of the original Internet email standard that allows users to exchange text, audio or visual files.
Phishing is a technique for acquiring information such as user names, passwords, credit cards, social security numbers and other personal data by masquerading as a trusted business like a bank or credit card company. With phishing messages, the email appears to be sent by the trusted entity and the consumer is tricked into providing their personal information.
POP: Post Office Protocol – A protocol used to retrieve email from a mail server. Most email clients use either the POP or the newer IMAP protocol.
Protocol: The set of formal rules that describe how to transmit data, especially across a network of computers.
Spoofing is a technique where forged email addresses are used to trick recipients into opening an email because the source has been hidden. This deceptive tactic is used to spread viruses and other malicious programs. Spoofing emails are often sent out as pretending to be large companies trying to steal your account info by having you click a link and enter your account credentials.
Server: A program that acts as a central information source and provides services to programs in the same or other computers. The term can either refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running.
SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol – A protocol used to send email on the Internet. SMTP is a set of rules regarding the interaction between a program sending email and a program receiving email.
Whitelist: A list of pre-authorized email addresses from which email messages can be delivered regardless of spam filters.

Email Dictionary: Glossary of Terms You Should Know, Part 1

Posted on by
spamdrain_gpHere are some useful words regarding email domain that our spamster gathered for our users:
Alias: A unique and usually shorter URL (link) that can be distinguished from other links even if they ultimately go to the same Web page. This makes it possible to track which message led viewers to click on the link.
Attachment: An audio, video or other data file that is attached to an email message.
Autoresponder: A computer program that automatically responds with a prewritten message to anyone who sends an email message to a particular email address or uses an online feedback form.
Authentication: A term that refers to standards, such as Sender ID, SPF and DomainKeys/DKIM, that serve to identify that an email is really sent from the domain name and individual listed as the sender. Authentication standards are used to fight spam and spoofing.
Blacklist: A list containing email addresses or IP addresses of suspected spammers. Blacklists are sometimes used to reject incoming mail at the server level before the email reaches the recipient.
Block: An action by an Internet Service Provider to prevent email messages from being forwarded to the end recipient.
Bounce Rate: The rate at which your emails are not delivered. There are two types of bounces, hard and soft, both of which are defined later in this glossary. An acceptable bounce rate is less than 5%.
Bulk Mail: Large scale email marketing sends in which the same content goes to a large group of people.
Bounces: Email messages that fail to reach their intended destination. “Hard” bounces are caused by invalid email addresses, whereas “soft” bounces are due to temporary conditions, such as overloaded inboxes.
Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an additional layer of email authentication that builds on the two previous authentication methods Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). First and foremost, both SPF and DKIM must be implemented before a DMARC policy can be put into place.
DNS: Domain Name Server (or system): An Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses.
DomainKeys/DKIM: DomainKeys/DomainKeys Identified Mail are cryptographic authentication solutions that add signatures to email messages, allowing recipient sites to verify that the message was sent by an authorized sender and was not altered in transit.
Domain name: A name that identifies one or more IP addresses. Domain names always have at least two parts that are separated by dots (for instance lsoft.com). The part on the left is the second-level domain (more specific), while the part on the right is the top-level domain (more general).
Email: Email allows you to send and receive text, HTML, images and other data files over the Internet. Email is one of the most popular online activities and has become a vital tool for electronic commerce.
Email bounces: Email messages that fail to reach their intended destination. “Hard” bounces are caused by invalid email addresses, whereas “soft” bounces are due to temporary conditions, such as overloaded inboxes.

New Help Articles

Posted on by

Thanks to our users, we have already updated some articles and added two new help articles at our help center. One of them is regarding Apple two factor authentication issue and another one is regarding yahoo mail connection. Please feel free to check those new articles under the Troubleshooting area. We hope those updates will help you to configure the settings and let Spamdrain keep your Inbox clean as always.

As usual, you can find other useful information at our help center. Please do not hesitate to contact our support here support@spamdrain.com in case you have any further questions.

Have a nice day and your inbox clean from Spam  🙂