CreationIS – Internet Services

Ol’ McDonald had a farm – Email, email, Oh… Do you know how easy it is to farm your email and anybody you send your email to? Simple as pie! Hackers, Identity thieves, and just plain malicious people prey on the simplicity of peoples trust and spend long hours figuring out ways to make you think you are having a good time.

Today’s blog will be on general ways people track your emails or steal your email address. Later in the week we will look into more specific methods and ways to prevent them.

Technology is only as good as the people using it. Since technology can not be intrinsically good or evil – we must assume it is the people at work behind the technology. Let us start with:

Email Farming
First: Email farming is the technology which allows the software user to “farm” emails out of thin air! Is it magic? No! It is simple electronics. The software captures live email addresses while an email is in transit to its location. This giving the Farmer the knowledge right away that the email is a valid email address.

Second: There is other software available that surfs web sites and farms static emails built into your HTML. And you wonder why, after awhile you start receiving continuous email to that email address.

Third: Now you have the “Email Tracker”, which farms email addresses from an email that you send back to them. “How do I send back my email to them?” you might be asking yourself. It is simple.

Simple Scenario: You receive an email from a friend, relative or work associate. Usually it is someone you know. The email is one of those funny joke emails or bless you and pass it on emails that everyone who is anyone gets at one time or another if you spend enough time on the Internet. Let’s say it is a funny joke or story. You read it because it was sent to you from a friend. (Email is track that it was delivered correctly). It tells you “if you laughed at any of these jokes to send it on to your entire mailing list and make someone else laugh too”. What do you do? You send it on. You put everyone you know who might like these jokes in your To: line of your email and mail it off. Now your email has just sent a tracking email to your entire email list and collected Valid – Opt In emails because you participated in the forwarding scam. The tracking email now sends a second email back to its owner and farms all your emails.

During this next week, we are going to look at each one of these in depth and show you simple techniques to keep your email from being scammed or your identities from being stolen.

Until then, don’t wait until you are a victim – start today! Don’t forward junk mail to your friends.

Until next time,

M.L. Zupan – a.k.a. EasySpeak