According to an article by Technology Review, China is the worst offender of all the internet spammers in the world. Brazil, Turkey, and the U.S. follow in the ranks.
In the article, research showed that $525.7 million was lost due to internet fraud in the U.S. How much more is lost due to business productivity and waste of bandwidth!
At work, I hardly receive spam. The IT department setup pretty good spam filters to keep everyone’s inbox free from spam. I do get a notification email everyday listing suspicious emails that might possibly not be spam. But they usually are.
In my previous workplace, I get at least 50 spam a day. After 6 weeks of summer vacation, my mailbox no longer works because I’ve reached storage capacity.
In my Gmail account, I have about 2400 emails in my spam box currently. I wonder how many of these spam originated from China. Thankfully, Gmail spam filter is pretty good at keeping them away from my Inbox. Occasionally, one or two slips through.
Yahoo! Mail on the other hand is terrible at filtering out spam. I used Yahoo! Mail for several years before switching to Gmail in 2004. I’m glad I did because Gmail is so much more powerful and easier to user. I still check my Yahoo! mailbox every few weeks to see if any old contacts still used that account. Unfortunately, I have to filter through hundreds of spam before I find one or two relevant email. This is one reason why I would never use Yahoo Mail again.
Cool Gmail Trick
Even though Gmail is good at filtering out spam, I learned one Gmail trick that helps in protecting your email from spammers. You can add . (dots) to your Gmail email and the emails would still route to your Gmail account.
For example, if your gmail account is janedoe@gmail.com, you can use jane.doe@gmail.com to register random online websites. Then, setup a filter to either delete, archive, or label all emails to jane.doe@gmail.com. You’ll be surprised at how TERRIBLE these websites are at keeping your email private, as the disclaimer often claims to do. I’ve used this trick a few times and immediately, I started receiving spam to these new dot-accounts.
What do you do to keep your inbox spam free?
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no one answered my question…. is 10 K RMB per month a good salary in Qingdao…pls give details….
June 10th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
another way is putting somethng like this [@] …
June 14th, 2008 at 12:26 am
Another trick I saw on a friend’s blog is to take a screen capture of your email and include it as an image.