Email: The difference between spam, junk mail and scams.

We all know the feeling of opening our email and seeing a long list of unopened emails waiting in our inbox. One by one, we scroll down and look at each item. Some we are expecting, some we have no idea what they are about and others have a little surprise we didn’t expect.

What most people don’t know is that their Internet Service Provider (ISP) filters all the emails before they end up in your inbox, using highly sophisticated software that will block emails based on certain words, certain senders, harmful attachments and other patterns. For every “bad” email that gets through these lines of defence, there are millions of emails that are blocked. Good ISPs are always working at improving their firewalls and defences in order to protect their email users.

Spam and junk mail refer to the same thing. These are emails that you receive without giving the sender permission to contact you. So these are unsolicited emails. In most cases, the sender will have sent out millions of these emails to different people. They usually buy the names and email addresses from data providers (legal or illegal).

You can expect an increase in spam or junk mail after there has been a big data breach somewhere in the world. For example, last week millions of personal records were stolen from the credit bureau TransUnion. This data will have been sold on the dark web to people who will use it to spam and/or scam people.

Spam emails are usually marketing emails trying to sell something. They can be sent from legitimate brands or people pretending to be legitimate brands. Not all spam emails are scams. Some companies will send millions of unsolicited emails hoping to attract new customers. This practise is now illegal as consumers are protected from receiving any digital marketing without giving explicit consent by the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) which came into effect in 2021. Companies that send emails without permission will face heavy fines and damage to their brand reputation.

As a consumer, POPIA protects you from receiving an SMS, WhatsApp, Email or robocall from anyone unless you gave them permission to market to you in those channels. The only way they can contact non-clients is to make one telephone call to request permission.

So hopefully, we will see fewer unsolicited emails in future.

Scam emails are specifically geared to manipulate the recipient into sending money or sharing personal information. These are sent to millions of people in the hopes that, even if only a few people respond, it will be worth their while. So they are unsolicited, spam or junk mail emails but the intent is to defraud or steal from the recipient.