Title: What is a Sender of Unsolicited Emails?

URL: https://www.infobip.com/glossary/sender-of-unsolicited-emails

The sender of unsolicited emails (or suspicious sender or black hat sender) is a sender that sends emails to recipients who haven’t permitted them to do so.

Although not all suspicious activity is intentional, even if the recipients give permission, a sender who sends too many emails may be flagged as a spammer.

## How to identify suspicious emails?

In recent years, phishing has evolved a lot. Before, it was easy to recognize suspicious emails by their obvious spelling mistakes, exaggerated requests, or threats. Nowadays, phishing emails include personalized demands and/or known contacts of the attacked person.

### 1. Check the source

If you don’t know the sender, ask yourself does this person/company exist? If the sender looks familiar, but something is different, that should be your warning sign.

### 2. Check the subject

Always be careful of links in subject lines. If they are not bad promotions or newsletters, they are likely spam.

### 3. Check the content

As for the content, if they ask for your personal information (including passwords, official documents, opening attachments, following links, filling up a form, etc.), you should think twice about why they are asking you to do so. The two main extensions used for phishing attacks are .exe and .hta.

When a link is available in the body or the subject line, check its URL before opening. If the website seems suspicious, access it from a search engine rather than following the link.

Be wary when opening any attachments or links.

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