Email, dos and don'ts
No bank, online shopping company, mobile network or credit card provider will ever ask you for your password.
Every day in Britain, millions of emails are sent and received. Of these, around 80 per cent are spam messages.
These are like the junk mail letters you get through your front door, all trying to sell you something you don’t want. They could be promoting adult sites, online pharmacies selling drugs, free software or offering the latest celebrity gossip.
But most often, they have an even more sinister purpose behind them.
Spam email is an easy tool for cybercriminals to carry out scams, steal personal information or distribute computer viruses and spyware.
Phishing is the biggest email problem to beware of. It is when you receive a message purporting to be from your bank or credit card company and asking you to reply with passwords and account details to confirm your identity. By doing this, you’d be handing the keys to your financial life to thieves.
No bank, online shopping company, mobile phone network or credit card provider will ever ask you for your password in this way.
But with spam so prevalent, it can be hard to see through deluge in your inbox. So here are 12 tips – six Dos and six Don’ts – that should help prevent you from falling victim to these crooks and their bogus offers.
DO: Turn on the junk mail filtering system that is offered by your email provider. This will send spam into a separate folder you can check through and then empty. When a junk message slips through to your inbox, always mark it as spam to try and prevent it happening again.
DO: Break up your email address if you must post it publicly. Put spaces or extra characters in between, in different colours or fonts, so people can easily see what to remove to get the right address for you. Automated tools the hackers use will then not be able to recognise it.
DO: Share email inboxes with younger children so you can see who is contacting them and who they are sending messages to. It could prevent them from being cyberbullied or hassled by strangers intent on causing them harm.
DO: Beware of shortened links in emails. These are commonly used on social networks such as Twitter to create a link of fewer characters. But they won’t allow you to see what you are clicking on or where you are being taken to, until it is too late. This means you could be diverted to a site containing a virus or spyware.
DO: Check with friends and family if you’re unsure about a link they have sent you in an email. It is possible their account has been hacked and the message is being sent by a spammer to trick even more people.
DO: Create a second email address that you only use to sign up to websites and offers. This ensures your personal email for friends and family is less likely to be in the public domain and find its way onto a spammer’s list.
DON’T: Post your email address on a social network site, chatroom or webpage. Criminals use software to trawl these sites and identify email addresses, which they then harvest and turn into lists they sell on.
DON’T: Reply to spam emails and ask to be removed. All this does is let the people sending it know your address is live and active. This will only lead you to get more spam and junk in your inbox.
- DON’T: Use simple words or phrases as your email password. It means your account could easily be hacked by automated systems that try millions of different combinations of letters. Mix up your passwords and use numbers and special characters too. This will make them hard to identify.
DON’T: Pass on junk mail. What might seem a harmless joke, poem, chain letter or funny story will simply clog up the internet and inboxes. Receiving so many of these types of messages are what cause people to be caught off-guard when a more sinister spam email arrives.
DON’T: Trust any email asking you for your password. This is known as Phishing and should never ever be replied to. Report it to the bank or organisation it claims to be from so they can alert other users and customers.
DON’T: Believe everything you read. Spam emails will often have a false subject line to try and trick you into opening the message. It may be a tempting offer, or the promise of something for nothing, but there will always be a catch. That could leave you open to all sorts of problems.
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