Eight Quick Tips For Stopping SPAM

If you are buried in SPAM then you're not alone. It's been
suggested that as much as 50% to 75% of the e-mail traffic on
any given day is SPAM. Reading through SPAM is a waste of your
time and it subjects you to potential viruses, trojan horses,
and sexual material which can be quite offensive. Here are some
tips on how to win the SPAM war:

1. Use a throwaway email address when posting to public news
groups and chat rooms and for your Yahoo or MS Messenger Chat
accounts. You can get free email addresses at Yahoo, HotMail and
other places. Use your personal ISP-provided email address only
to communicate with trusted sources. If you are an AOL user then
set up an additional email account to use for public posting
purposes. When your free or spare email account starts getting
abused just close it and open another.

2. Take the time to set up different email addresses for
different purposes. Have one for business communications,
another for personal and another one for shopping online. That
way you can avoid the risk of exposing one e-mail address to all
of your contacts.

3. If you own your own web site then the chances are that your
hosting account comes with the ability to create new e-mail
addresses on the fly. These are addresses that will
automatically forward to your main address. If you have that
capability then use a unique address for each web site or mailing
list that you choose to join. For example, if your site name is
abc.com and you decide to join the mailing list located at
xyz.com, you would join using the address xyz@abc.com. If you
start getting SPAM to this address then you know that the people
who run xyz.com are responsible. You can complain to them and
their ISP and you can easily delete that email address.

4. Don't list your email address on your own web site in plain
html or as a link to a contact form. Spammers use automated
robots to capture these addresses and add them to SPAM
databases. Instead use an email cloaking script whenever you
need to show your email address. You can search at Google.com
using the phrase "email cloaking" and come up with a lot of
options. Just pick the one that works best for your particular
needs.

5. Do not buy anything from a company that sends you SPAM. Not
only might the company or offer be a scam but you are jumping
right into the fire by letting spammers know that your email
address is active and that you buy from spammers. Your address
will be sold to thousands of other spammers.

6. Never reply to a spammer or click the "remove my address"
link. That only lets them know that your address is good.

7. If your email service or email client comes with SPAM filters
use them.

8. You might want to think about subscribing to a SPAM prevention
service. Search on Google.com for "SPAM prevention service" and
review your options.

Following these simple tips could cut your SPAM down by as much
as 90%. Wouldn't that be great!