Spam is basically unsolicited email, some of which can contain malware and viruses and the volume of spam received can change from day to day by quite a large amount. While spam cannot be stopped completely, there are things you can do to help prevent it.
If you are suddenly seeing an increase in the amount of spam it is likely due to a general increase in the amount being sent by spammers. If the level of spam you receive continues to increase, then you should consider being cautious of where your email address is given.
Many spammers will use spambots - a program that gathers email addresses to send spam to - and trawl websites for email addresses in plain text, to add to their mailing lists.
For example: Many websites have a "contact us" page or similar that are typically coded in the "mailto" format, which when clicked, causes the address to open an e-mail message window. This type of coding allows spambots to easily harvest the email addresses from such pages, resulting in an increase of spam.
Here are a few things you can do in order to help decrease the amount of spam you receive:
Never open spam mail as many have attachments that could install malware or trojans on your system. These usually are mailing trojans which, once installed, mail spam (and possibly the trojan) to everyone on your list, thereby increasing the issue and could result in your IP or our mailserver being blacklisted by anti spam organisations.
If you do inadvertently open any spam email, never respond to spam mail or any mail that is suspicious - this only serves to confirm that you have a working email address that may be then targeted more. Please do not click on any unsubscribe link unless it is from a mailing list you have subscribed to.
Show your email address as an image on your website or write the address in words such as "me at mysite dot com" in order to stop addresses from being picked up by spambots.
Be cautious of where you give out your email address - newsgroups, forums, blogs and similar are all targets for spammers.
Use any filters in your email client such as Outlook or Mac Mail, ensuring you use the "mark mail as spam" feature to "train" your email client to recognise what is likely to be spam. Please only use this feature for genuine "spam."
QiQ also offers spam filtering via the hosting control panel, under the Email Configuration section. Junk mail filters use advanced technology to attempt to filter out junk mail before you receive it. In order to use filtering effectively, please set up a mailbox for any email addresses you wish to control spam on.
Please note that spam filtering is not always perfect - there can be false-positives and false-negatives, so do keep an eye on your spam mailbox for mail that's been incorrectly filtered, and do watch out for phishing emails that slip through the filter.
If you have any further queries or concerns, please contact support HERE.
