How Opening an Email Address Can Tell Spammers You Exist

Did you realize that simply by opening up an e-mail addresscents by a spammer, the you can actually be verifying to them that your e-mail address is valid and is checked by someone?

A common trick used by spammers is to send an HTML e-mail message. While most people just think they used images to make their spam more noticeable, often times it is actually embedded in their in order to find out if the e-mail message was actually read by someone. And once they know your e-mail address is read by a human, and not being filtered out by a spam filter or sent to a dormant e-mail account, you can actually find yourself on the receiving end of an increased amount of spam.

When you open up an e-mail that is an HMO format and contains an image, you're a e-mail program will load the image directly from the spammers server. And many of these images are coded specifically for you, so they know it was your e-mail address that viewed it.

Also, when you open up the e-mail message, you are also revealing your current IP address to that spammer. Using that information they can find out a lot about you such as your physical location of the world, and it can also be exploited to attack your computer.

You will want to make sure that you are either using an e-mail program that will not automatically download images (you can request specific images be downloaded) or is one that isn't capable of displaying them. Likewise, using the preview pane on one of the Outlook based programs can also display images and send your personal information, even if you technically do not open them.

You can also install a spam filter that will prevent many of these even out messages from reaching you with the first place.

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