In this month’s instalment of Ask CyberGuru, we answer the question, “I have received a number of suspicious emails from organisations that I haven’t subscribed to and am wary of unsubscribing from them for fear of dire consequences. I simply view and delete them, and would never click on any links. What is the best course of action for dealing with these?”.
In terms of your question, it is a difficult one to answer but I appreciate the position you are in. If you know the source of the email (such as if you know the organisation), it would be generally possible to unsubscribe without an issue. Unfortunately, some irreputable companies use emails like these to determine if your email address is active, so if you click on the “unsubscribe” link provided you will not be unsubscribed. Instead they will send you more junk email and may even on sell your address to other scammers!
So how do you prevent your email address from becoming a target in the first place? This is a tricky one because you still want prospective clients to be able to find you. One common way spammers find your email address is by looking at your website. If they are coming via the email address on your website, you may be able to increase the filtering on your website hosting server to hopefully mark them as spam, or install the spam filtering plugin within your internet security product such as Norton Security.
There are other measures that can be undertaken such as finding out who sent it through the technical details, however it can be difficult to identify and verify the sender as these emails vary in numerous ways. As you have noted, I think the best course of action is not to open at all them and simply permanently delete them.
If you would like assistance with managing spam or any email-related activities, please contact us today.