And not in a good way…
If you’re in business and have an email address that appears on the web anywhere at all, chances are it has been harvested and sold on some list to be mass-marketed to, or worse: Spammed! The trouble is, quite often when an unsolicited email arrives in the inbox, we are unsure which one it is. The former, if sent from a legitimate business, should allow for you to unsubscribe for future mail outs (usually found in the fine print at the bottom). If this is not the case, then it is more than likely the latter: Spam!
To begin hunting for spam, start at the sender’s email address: in this instance, I can tell Dave is a bit of a monkey (even if he gives his warmest regards). Now continue down the page and rollover the links with your mouse (note: not possible to do this on your mobile device) and see the url address information. Then check the other links. Quite often, no matter what they say in the body of the email – even in the Unsubscribe link – it all points to the same url that if you click, will confirm your email address as active and be passed onto many more spammers.
Although the links and the unsubscribe url in this email appear to be valid marketing, clicking and participating in this sort of marketing will lead to an influx of similar emails. The only way to win this war is to get trigger happy with the unsubscribe button once you are happy it is valid.
