The fact all these annoying and unsolicited emails are arriving into your spambox is a sign gmail is working perfectly. All you neeed to do is check your spam box periodically to make sure the email of people you know isnt there by accident.
To answer your questions...
In laymans terms, the spam industry works approximately like this ;
The spammer has a program which carries out a set of instructions to send email to scientifically worked out and/or random permutations and combinations of addresses at the domain , eg: a@gmail , b @gmail , ab@gmail , abc @gmail, abcdefg@gmail , hotmail, yahoo and so on until your email address is targetted.
The spammer will basically attempt to have every word and letter combination programmed into the spamming dictionary. So its usually impossible or extremely difficult not to get spam.
Whenever you open spam the spammer will usually know because programming tricks embedded into the body of the spam email will send an alert that your email address is actually a live one right back to the spammer. Then your email is put on a special list of live verified email addresses and you are sent even more custom spam.This is why its important never to open spam!
There are 4 main ways a spammer will get your email ;
1, A blind guess in which email is sent to the address regardless of whether it exists or not. Remember the dictionary approach I wrote about earlier?
2, A program is used which harvests emails from webpages and google and uses these emails to set up a list of potential targets for spam which is why its important never to post your email openly upon a webpage or forum.
3, The spammer will buy a dvd with millions of emails (quite cheaply) from another spammer and use these
4, you gave your email to a shady/dodgy website which sold your email or to a website with no clear privacy policy.
5, you gave your email to a website which was subsequently hacked and had all its private information stolen.
I would suggest when at a point where you need to give your email to a website you dont trust to use the following:
www.trashmail.com
With trashmail you can create as many disposable forwarding email addresses as you want so you know the source of spam if it arrives at this address.
(I have a trashmail plugin for my firefox browser so all I do is right click and I have created a disposable email in 2 seconds)
www.mailinator.com
With mailinator the inbox has no password and is created as soon as mail arrives. This is the ulltimate in convenience but without any security.
Both have their uses.
Also when accessing sites such as unison.ie or online newspapers etc
Its much easier to go to
www.bugmenot.com and get a password there without having to sign up and hand over your email address to another party.
What i wanted to know is if the unsubscribe option link is authentic? Because it asks for my email address and im afraid it will sign me up for more garbage offers:Mad:
As you correctly guessed above,the unsubscribe option is extremely rarely authentic and honorable and should never be used. The spammer is akin to the devil himself and will never honor any agreement unless tracked down and legally forced to but with a lot off spam coming from lawless regions of the planet this is difficult or impossible in many cases.
Regards, Sign.
