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Detecting Spam in Your Inbox

There are a few ways to tell if an email is spam, even when it looks authentic. Here’s how to figure out if a spammer is trying to phish you:

• The email address is suspicious. Look closely at the sender’s email address. If the URL doesn’t match with the establishment’s official URL address, they’re almost definitely a phisher.
• Check the spelling. A major corporation rarely sends out emails with typos or grammatical mistakes.
• They don’t use your name. If the sender doesn’t know who you are, that’s a big red flag.
• Outrageous demands, threats, and/or claims are made in the message. Phishers often try to create a sense of urgency. Their ploy is to get you to open their attachments, send them money, and so forth.
• The email seems too good to be true. If you won some contest you didn’t enter, like the jackpot lottery or a free cruise, it’s definitely a scam.
• There’s no signature. If there are no contact details, be very cautious. Real companies never send emails without a signature. They want their clients to be able to contact them.

Avoiding Getting Phished

Once you identify an email as spam, do not answer it, reveal personal information, or open the attachments. The email’s attachments likely contain viruses or malware, which can be used to steal your identity, spy on your activity, or damage files on the device. The same advice goes for suspicious links. On most computer browsers, you can hover your cursor over a link. If the URL appears fishy, don’t click on it. Finally, if the email comes from an establishment you belong to (i.e. a bank or company), you can contact them directly, in person or by phone, to double-check the authenticity.

Spam Emails

Right from the start, like most email clients, Microsoft Outlook evaluates your incoming messages, determining whether or not they are spam. Anything that doesn’t make the cut heads directly to your spam folder so you never have to deal with it.

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But this email program goes a step above and beyond. Most messages that arrive to your inbox are in HTML format. Many of them contain images or even sounds that are from another place on the Internet (an external source).

Sometimes, scammy email providers use those things to grab your email address. When you open the email, the content is downloaded automatically, and the spammer is able to effortlessly validate your email address. After that, it may be sold off to additional spammers so you receive even more junk emails — as if you didn’t receive enough already. Luckily, Microsoft Outlook blocks these automatic picture downloads.

Phishing

There are plenty of junk emails that pretend to be from legitimate sources. They may pose as a financial institution, an insurance company, or an online retailer (to name a few). No matter who they pretend to be, they share a common goal: to get you to provide your personal information. They are hoping to trick you into providing your account number or passwords so they can get into it themselves.

Phishing scams aren’t always easy to spot. The junk email filter checks out each incoming email to make sure it doesn’t contain suspicious links, and to see if the sender’s address is legitimate. To keep you from making a big mistake, those emails are routed to your junk folder, and any functionality (like clicking links or replying to the message), is disabled.

However, there is always a risk, as Outlook’s system isn’t perfect. Install DFNDR on your Android smartphone for highly effective antivirus and malware protection. If a malicious email slips through, DFNDR will detect the threat immediately.