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Any lawyer, doctor, etc. worth their weight in salt does not use hotmail as their email provider.

It is pretty safe to assume that if you got an email from someone claiming to be such a type of professional and the email address is a hotmail address, it is spam or a phishing attempt and you should just delete it.

As a note for any lawyers, doctors, etc. reading this, if you are, you really need to get an email address with your own company’s domain in it.

In this case you will likely be receiving non delivery reports (NDRs) generated by the outbound spam traffic.

Unfortunately since the spammer is almost certainly using network resources not under Yahoo’s control, short of analyzing traffic and attempting to track it down to the source networks which will most likely lead back to a group of diverse, compromised computers, (not a recommended good use of your time), the best option is probably to define a message rule. Locate something common but unique about the NDRs so that they are automatically moved into a separate folder or simply deleted.

These NDRs are not themselves spam and thus they are unlikely to get blocked by existing spam blocking measures.

Eventually the spammer will select some other address to use.

Note: you would have more options to block this sort of thing if you had domain based email, particularly your own domain under your control, then you could contact your hosting company for assistance blocking the traffic, or use any number of domain-based antispam services such as Total Mail Defense.

Additionally, domain based email accounts are generally less likely to be subject to this sort of abuse, although it can happen to any email address.

Answer written by Founder, Chairman and CTO, Ron Edison

Join any social media site and soon you will find people spamming you. Luckily, it is easier to unfriend someone who spams you on social media sites.

What I would recommend is when someone spams you on social media sites there are two courses to take:

1) If it isn’t someone you know well, just a business acquaintance who you won’t miss, unfriend them immediately. Hopefully they will figure it out when they start lossing friends all over the place that they shouldn’t be abusing the network.

2) If it is someone you know better and would like to be connected to, respond back to them and tell them you don’t want their spam and this is their warning. If they do it a second time, then unfriend them.

Wish email spam was as easy.

There will be a lot of email being sent, some of it from companies you trust, some from those you have never heard of before. Some of these companies know and understand the spam rules, some do not know or choose to ignore them.

Some of these companies may actually be sending you coupons and other incentives to buy through them (and some of these you may actually want).

Additionally, the spammers for all those lovely drugs and pictures and such will be using the holidays in their subject lines and other ways trying to get you to open the email.

What to do in this storm?

First, tell your email program not to view images automatically. This way you won’t accidentally download something while opening images.

Read the sender’s email address and make sure it looks for real. The email address should end in the name of the companies website.com (like sears.com, costco.com and such).

Unfortunately this isn’t always the case and some legitimate email comes from other addresses. So, if you look at the sender’s email address and it looks funny, but you ARE expecting the email from that company (you signed up for them), go ahead and look at the email (with the images off).

If you aren’t expecting the email and the address looks funny, delete it.

If you have gotten far enough along to open the email now read through it and see where it links out. Before clicking the link put the mouse cursor over it and then look at the bottom of your email program where an address should be written out.

Only click on the link it is going to the actual website. DO NOT click on it if it goes via another website or look similar but is in fact a trick (like sears.cr.com or something). If the address looks funny, go straight to the website yourself without clicking on the link.

With many people’s pocket books getting thinner this year we need to be careful with where we buy stuff from and make sure we don’t get caught by spammers.

Of course, if you haven’t heard that Barack Obama is our new president elect, then you might have been living under a rock.

However, as a heads-up, the spammers are using his name all over their subject lines to try and get people to click on the email and open it.

My advice as always, don’t click on the email and get your news from the right sources. Go straight to your favorite real news source (CNN, Yahoo News, Google news, MSNBC or whatever) and read up there.

Some links for you:
http://www.itbrief.co.nz/
http://www.abc3340.com/news/
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/

You can send an email “To:” someone or “CC:” someone or even “BCC:” them.

CC is a hold over of terminology from the good old days when you had to use a piece of carbon copy to make a duplicate of something (before copiers were widespread).

So when you CC someone you are making a copy for them to read.

BCC means a blind carbon copy, you know when you gave some data to a co-worker but sent a copy of the communication to your boss so he would know where that person got it from.

When sending an email you should utilize all of these different fields.

The biggest mistake I have seen done on this is when someone tries to forward an email to a large number of their address book and they put everyone in the “To:” or “CC:” fields.

I have spoken of this before most recently in my post Forwarding Warning or Alarming Emails, but the fact holds true even when sending one of those cute emails to your friends to make them laugh.

When you put everyone in the “To:” or the “CC:” then everyone gets to see everyone’s email address. Now maybe you feel your friends wouldn’t abuse the messages, but if they ever get hacked and someone else looks for all the addresses they know, you have just exposed all your friends.

So be sure to use your email fields correctly, to protect your friends.

Hopefully everyone is outside having fun and not having to work and answer email.

With all the distractions of co-workers and kids wearing funny clothes, make sure you keep your eyes open on any emails you click on.

The best way to not get caught and hurt by spam and/or phishing: keep your eyes open and avoid anything that strikes you as funny.

It is great fun to watch the spam subject lines that people talk about on twitter. Just do a search on Twitter search for “spam subjects” (or click here).

Then there is going through my hotmail account and laughing at the stuff that makes it through their filter.

Then there is the spam I get on my facebook account, people forwarding those scammy alerts to their entire address book.

Also those people on facebook who don’t seem to understand that because I said once I couldn’t make their event, doesn’t mean that if you send me the invite again I will suddenly change my mind.

Also those new twitter followers who just post one tweet after another about their product, all with links back to their site.

Don’t even get my started on MySpace.

Seems every new system that goes up, someone works out how to spam it. People, learn to participate in the community, not abuse it!

My friend did two things wrong when forwarding this email.

1) She forwarded it to almost her entire address book, and put all these email address in the “To” line. Which means I can see all of these people and their email address and these other people see it to. Anyone can now email all these people.

I don’t know who these people are and don’t know that I want all of them to have my email address, but the choice has been taken away from me (if just one of these people is a spammer, I have just been signed up for another piece).

If you are going to forward an email to your address book, put all the names in the “BCC” field. BCC stands for Blind Cabon Copy, which means everyone is blind to the address it is sent to. People will still get the email, but they won’t be able to see any of the email addresses.

2) My friend claims she read the Snopes page to verify this, but she obviously only scanned it, because she missed at the bottom where it says:

“Readers should take particular care not to confuse the real postcard/greeting card virus with a number of virus-related hoaxes that have been circulating for several years. A variety of messages forwarded by well-intended people to warn others about the Postcard virus contribute to this confusion by including within them links to our article about the “Virtual Card for You” hoax”.

If you are going to forward an alarming email (or any news for the matter) make sure you have 100% verified it is real, don’t scan and do half a job on this. Some people don’t take alarming news well and they get upset, especially if they don’t know what to do about it.