Although email has been one of the most common routes for virus infection for the past 10 years, many people still open attachments from people they now don’t know. Seconds later, a virus is installed and then the problem really begins.

If the infection that may come from some of these emails were to stop on your computer alone, the overall damage would be minimal, but unfortunately many viruses are designed to spread over the Internet without any further action on your part and this can infect other computers. , which is a much bigger problem.

One of the most popular ways for Internet service providers or email service providers to block certain messages is to tell the email client which emails are spam and which are not. This is quite easy to do by clicking the “this is spam” button in your email client.

While this makes it easy for you to report an email to your ISP or ESP as spam, there are also some downsides to this method. For example, many people use this method to try to unsubscribe from lists they have previously subscribed to. By labeling these emails as spam, you unfairly label the sender as a spam sender, which is inaccurate since you signed up to receive the emails to begin with.

It is easy to identify around 80% of the emails that arrive in our email inboxes. We can easily identify which ones are SPAM and which ones are real. The problem is deciding on the remaining 20% ​​of emails. Whether these emails are wanted or represent spam is a much more difficult proposition. You may not want a particular email, but that hardly makes it spam. You may not want to receive political cartoons from your uncle, but receiving them hardly constitutes spam and reporting these emails as spam would be unfair.

You can use something called “authentication”, which is really nothing more than having someone tag the message as coming from a trusted or desired source. If you know the source won’t spam you, you’re much more likely to open the email you receive, and therefore much less likely to get a virus or other infection. One authentication method you may have seen is ‘Sender ID’. This requires every email to have a Sender ID attached to it so you know right away if an email is from a trusted source or not.

Posting by email is another authentication method. You’ve probably responded to these emails in the past when you signed up for an email list or to receive email from a particular website; once you do, you will immediately receive an email asking you to confirm before being added to their email list. This allows you to confirm that you requested an email from the site and that you want and appreciate the email you receive.

Some researchers have estimated that up to 70% of the emails we receive are spam, while others argue that it is less than 50%. Regardless of what the percentage is, the reality is that most of us receive a number of emails every day that we do not want, that are not desirable for us and that in some cases can be dangerous. Whichever method ends up being used more successfully in the future, it is hoped that it will be the one that decreases these spam emails.