How To Fight Spam

The first step in reducing the amount of spam that you get in your mail box is to make sure you never publish your email address online. That includes on web pages, in forums and any kind of advertising. If you must give out an email address don’t use the xxx@xxx.com format as there are robots that crawl the web looking for this so that they can add these emails to lists that spammers use.

It might not be a bad idea to get two email addresses. Use one to give out to friends, family and other people you want to get emails from. The other one you can use if you need an email to register at a website or to apply online. These emails are sometimes sold to email lists. This way you can just ignore anything that comes in on the second email account as it is most likely spam.

Never reply to a spam or click the “unsubscribe” link. This only notifies the spammers that there really is a person at the email address and encourages them to send more spam! Just because they have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email does not mean that they have any intention of removing you from their list.

Get some software that you can use to filter spam. While you will probably never get rid of all of it, you can use these steps to reduce the amount you have to deal with every day.