Top 5 Signs of a Spam Email

Email is a must-have for easily doing business. For everything from work, shopping, social media and keeping in touch, the benefits email provides has made organisations more efficient and productive than ever before.

Even with all these benefits, having an email address does come with its security risks. With the increasing threats of viruses and spyware from spam and phishing emails, it’s now more important than ever before to ensure your customers are protected.

Ensure your customers’ business security with these tips for keeping their emails safe and identity spam emails:

Poor grammar and spelling

A well known way to identify spam is when the email is full of spelling or grammatical mistakes or looks like it has been translated online. However, with the quality of these spam emails improving, it’s now more important than ever before to make sure your customers are thoroughly checking all emails for any indication of a spam email.

Unknown or odd email address

With spear-phishing attacks becoming increasingly more advanced, personalisation in emails, both for businesses and spam, is another way hackers try to convince the recipient that it’s a legitimate email. A way to check this out is to review the email address of the sender. If the address looks unrealistic, has a domain that you don’t recognise or isn’t related to the sender’s name or company, then this email should not be trusted.

The email’s content

With the amount of emails we all receive each day, it can be hard to spot what is genuine. Two common traits in spam emails are requests to provide sensitive information and offers which seems too good to be true.

If anything about the email’s content makes you unsure, don’t click any links and get in touch with the sender company to find out if it’s legitimate.

Strange attachments and links

Company emails will often have a call to action, in the form of a link or attachment, prompting you to find out more. Spam emails providing links and attachments can infect your PC with damaging viruses and spyware.

To check this, you can hover over email links to see if they look genuine or not. It’s a good way to see if they are malicious, without actually clicking on the link. Implementing an email and web threat protection such as Symantec Web Protect and Control helps end users from clicking on malicious links.

Ensuring your customers safety

Though spam is a major concern, this shouldn’t prevent businesses from taking advantage of using email as a way of effectively communicating. Being aware of how to spot spam, and implementing an email security solution, which can identify and remove 99% of spam before it reaches the mailbox, as well as ensuring emails are safe by implementing a backup storage solution will protect users from risks and give them confidence online.