British developer finds new way to stop spam

Annoyed with growing spam in your inbox? You may have a better way to deal with it, as a British developer has created a new method to get rid of such spam.

Rory Ashford, who runs the Twitter handle roikles, is a creative developer from Huddersfield who has shared an easy solution for spam via a tweet. The posting quickly attracted some 3265 users who have retweeted it. It also had some 2743 "favourites".

By changing your email address to the one used by the sender or the company sending the spam, the sender itself will end up receiving their own spam emails, says Ashford. He says he did exactly that for a few websites and that it worked pretty well.

When you subscribe to a newsletter or purchase anything online, order food or any such activities, it leads to follow-up promotional emails. The recipient could either dump them in the "Junk" folder or unsubscribe. But sometimes you might continue to receive the promotional mails even after unsubscribing. So you can use the trick by Ashford.

In July LinkedIn said that its users would receive more infrequent and relevant emails only. For every 10 emails Linkedin used to send, it has now removed four. Earlier in June, security firm Symantec Intelligence, citing its own metrics, said the overall spam rate had dropped to 49.7%, the first time in over a decade it had declined. Additionally, phishing rates and email-based malware were also reduced in June.

"However, there were 57.6 million new malware variants created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April. This increase in activity lends more evidence to the idea that, with the continued drops in email-based malicious activity, attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape," Symantec said.