‘Tis the season… for spam email attacks? This time of year, lots of people are doing holiday shopping online. While the flood of order confirmation emails is just a hassle for most of us, for spammers they are an opportunity.
Holiday Email Scams
While the rest of us are getting excited for the Holiday season, some email Grinches out there are using the Holiday bustle to get into your inbox. Walmart has recently warned about fake confirmation emails being sent by spammers that appear to be sent by Wal-Mart.
Walmart is telling shoppers to keep an eye out for the classic hallmarks of spam:
- If you haven’t placed an order with Walmart recently, ignore emails that claim to be about a recent order from Walmart.
- Walmart has proofreaders in their marketing department. If you get an email claiming to be from Walmart that is riddled with misspellings and poor grammar, it’s spam.
- Shopping confirmation emails will include an order number. If there isn’t an order number in the email you open, be wary.
- If you look closely at the “from” line of a spam email, you’ll notice that it might not match the business it’s claiming to be sent from. You can check this by hitting “reply” and seeing which email address is now in the “to” line, but be careful not to actually send the email! Doing so will result in you receiving more spam.
- Sometimes you may see additional recipients in the “to” line of the email you receive. Obviously, any order confirmation email sent to you should only be sent to one address: yours!
Following these guidelines will help keep you safe from these holiday shopping scams.
Stopping Phishing Before Your Inbox
But do you want to hear a secret? Almost all email security providers will stop 99.9% of spam from getting into your inbox. If eliminating spam was all it took to be good at providing email security, you’d have a difficult time comparing one email security provider to another because every one will keep almost all spam out of your inbox, because that’s the easy part.
Where innovative email security providers set themselves apart is cutting down on false positives – instances where a legitimate email is flagged as spam and doesn’t make it to your inbox. This probably happens more than you think because most email security services use “content filtering” to identify spam. Content filtering looks at the words of an email and compares it to typical patterns seen in spam. If there are enough similarities, it sends the email to your spam folder.
But content filters make mistakes, and when they make mistakes they tend to be costly. Emails containing tax records, court notices, and health records are common false positives – and emails you would never want to miss. All of this is why Sendio doesn’t use content filtering and instead filters by contact to remove all spam without generating any false positives.
Contact filtering considers who the email is coming from in addition to what the email says in order to filter out spam, while making sure you never miss an important email. To learn how Sendio can help your business eliminate spam without generating any false positives, call (949) 274-4375.
