FredMitchell |
12-20-2023 05:57 PM |
There is too much misinformation in this post.
The typical top-level domains (TLDs) are .com, .edu, .org, and .mil. Then there are the country TLD, such as .us, .tv, and various miscellaneous ones such as .xxx
The next part to the left is the domain of an organization, e.g. "talkofthevillages". Anything to the left of that are subdomains of the organization.
So the first thing to look at is the domain structure of the uniform resource locator (URL) to determine the organization - everything after "https://" up to and including the TLD.
If the organization is one that you trust don't be rude and mark the email as spam. They are politely offering you an easy way to unsubscribe. They also don't want their communications to be labeled as spam. You probably signed up with them. If you no longer want messages from them, unsubscribe at least twice over a month or two. That is sufficient time for them to remove you as a subscriber.
Marking as spam - at least with gmail - is a serious thing that should only be used for unsolicited emails or organizations that fail to unsubscribe you (they are required by US federal law to honor your request).
Major internet service providers (ISPs) and mail services take blocking spam seriously. GMail blocks senders very aggressively from broadcasting too many emails and emails that appear to them to be spam - even when they were honest communications between a company and registered customers.
Before clicking on a link, hover the mouse over it. That should show you the URL. If you don't trust it, just don't click on it at all. Just mark it as spam. Services that allow you to mark things as spam use that and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their spam blockers. They are pretty darn good. Almost no spam gets through in practice. They may falsely label a legitimate email as spam (false positive), but the false negative of allowing spam into your inbox is very rare.
Finally, clicking on a link will not by itself install software on your computer. If it would then your computer is probably too ancient to even run it. Modern operating systems (OSes) will download a file, but it won't be opened without the permission of the owner of the computer.
Finally, do yourself a favor - google phishing - and read a few articles to understand what it is and how it works. Basically, it relies on you clicking on some link and actually doing something beyond that.
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