• Look at the email address – often, a long string of alphanumeric characters before the @ sign will be a dead giveaway that the email is spam.

• Look at what comes after the @ sign. If the email is from a respected company or well-established Web site, it will certainly not have an email address like [name of business here]@[free email service provider here].com. Business and established Web sites would have their name dot com after the @ sign.

• Look for a sense of urgency within the body of email. If it is asking you to do something right away or within X hours, it is a good indication of spam mail.

• Look for links within the body of the message. If it is a well-respected, highly used business or Web site, a legitimate email would simply tell you to log into your account to fix something, not click on a link.

• Look for grammatical and spelling errors within the email message. Emails from genuine sources will not have such errors.

• Look for greetings that are generic. If it says something along the lines of "Dear Valued Customer" or "Dear [company name] Member," it is usually spam.

• Look for an email asking for personal information. Banks, eBay, PayPal and other online services make it very clear that they will NEVER ask you for your personal information, especially over email.

Also gotta be careful clickin on links in any email, no matter how official the email looks. Alot of times the link will go somewhere completely different. Hovering your cursor over the link will alot of times give you a clue to where its really going but im sure that isnt foolproof either. If in doubt sandbox the link or really just do what napoleon said and go to the site directly and do whatever it is they want you to do.

Good info!


If you or anyone knows anything about this lemmie know: I get emails from my own email address that are spam. I thought maybe my account was phished so i changed password over and over, checked my account and they werent being sent from me but it still says my email address. So strange and this has gone on for a while. I think i may have to give up the account. its a yahoo account ive had for over 15 years and man it gets some spam like crazy. my yahoo messenger on that account is constantly getting hit with spam messages too.