TL;DR: Most all email users know about spam emails; but not all know the consequences of opening them or the safety procedures they should follow to prevent spam emails from stealing their personal information.

We all know about Google Gmail, we use it every day for personal and professional purposes. For the most part, we think that the emails we are receiving are safe, secure, and that we do not have worry about opening any of them. Unfortunately, many people are mistaken about this as some emails are not safe. One type of unsafe emails is spam emails. Gmail has done an amazing job separating our emails from primary, social and promotions, but they haven’t done an amazing job from protecting us from spam emails. We get spam emails every day, some might go straight to the spam folder and others to our primary inbox. They might seem just like a regular email, but they are not.

A lot of the spam emails that we get are just for advertising but, others are harmful and can steal your personal information from your computers. Spam emails use many tactics to try to steal your personal information. One of the most common ways is called phishing. Say you got an email from your “bank”, saying that you have to log in to your bank account for security reasons. The email also gives you a link where you have to go to login. You clicked on the link it takes you to a website that looks just like your bank’s website. You enter your username and password but after that, nothing happens. The person behind the spam email easily gains access to your bank account information by tricking you into thinking that they were your bank. Phishing is basically faking a website like Facebook or a bank website and when people enter their information, their information gets send to the person behind the phishing. Spam emails used many clever methods to trick email users to open them and follow whatever is inside them.

Another way of how spam emails can easily steal your information is by sending commercial emails. They advertise software programs that would “improve” your computer in many ways or something that would benefit you. These type of spam emails target people who have very little knowledge of computers and trick them into downloading programs. These programs are malicious, and once installed, collect, record usernames and passwords. An example of this type of scam is myself, I have fallen for this type of scam myself. I downloaded a program to clean my computer and make it faster, but instead, this program reduced its performance. Days later Someone tried to log in into my Google account from Russia. I reset my computer, deleted all my files and programs, and even resorted to reinstalling Windows to get rid of the program. Not only you can get malicious programs on your computer but, you can also get a virus. Your computer can become infected with a virus and it can be used to send spam emails to your contact list in Gmail and infect other people’s computers. We must always use Gmail securely and safely to avoid these types of spam emails.

According to Statista in 2014, spam emails accounted for 66.4 percent of email traffic worldwide. Millions of email users have become or will become a victim of spam emails if they do not safely and secure use emails. PCWorld shows us five different ways to stop spam emails from going into our emails. The first way to prevent spam emails from entering your emails is by training your email filter. When you get a spam email, you have the opinion of deleting it but, you also have the option of selecting it and reporting it as a spam email. By marking these emails as spam, you will stop receiving emails from that specific email. A good thing to do is going to your spam folders and selecting all potential spam emails and reporting them. You should never reply to a spam email, download anything from it or click on any links. You should always hide your email list, do not share it with people you do not know, and never post it on a website. You can also use a third-party anti-spam filter from google Chrome extension or other security software. Lastly, if your email has become overloaded with spam emails, sometimes creating a new email address is not a bad idea. You can always save your email contacts and avoid getting spam emails.

The detriments of using email services, such as Google Gmail, are widely known. There are loopholes that make our email experience unsafe and insecure. Even though Gmail has its own section for spam emails, there are a lot of people who do not know what they are. Google could inform those that use Gmail on what not to do with spam emails, as well as how to better use Gmail so that they do not receive spam emails.

Spam pixabay photo by Geralt shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license