After years of internet experience I’ve learned ways to keep Spam out of my
personal email accounts. Below you will find a few tricks in keeping Spam
AWAY!
1. Never give out your real email address to any website, for any
newsletter, or anyone other than people you WANT to contact and ones you
KNOW will not give your email address away. If you do want to subscribe to a
newsletter, or need someone to contact you from a form you filled out on the
web, set up a fake email account. Hotmail, Yahoo, Excite as well as many
others offer free email accounts that you can use for this purpose. It’s a
good thing to keep them active as you may have to respond to some forms and
newsletter to receive the information you’ve requested.
2. Tell your friends and family NOT to send you forwards as a batch mailing.
I always tell my friends and family that it’s fine to send me forwards, but
send it directly to me, not to a list of all their friends. This way you
know your email address isn’t piling up on a forward waiting for spammers to
grab them. Just the other day a friend of mine had sent me a forward
regarding the War on Terrorism. I looked through the email and there were
over 500 email address. Now if I had been a spammer, I could have taken all
500 email addresses and added them to my list.
Make sure you don’t fall victom to the “If you forward this to 100 people,
you’ll receive a bonus/whatever.” These are almost always false and Spammers
use these to grab email addresses.
Also, do your friends and family a favor. If a friend sent you a forward and
you want to forward it, make sure to delete all the email addresses contained
in the email.
3. If you do receive Spam in your inbox, DO NOT OPEN IT! Spammers are super
smart these days and they use trackers and other methods of seeing who is
active and who isn’t. There are ways to delete mail without opening it in
your mail program. If you don’t know how, figure it out. If you happen to
open one, don’t respond to them. If they don’t have trackers in their
emails, then they will definitely know you’re an active subscriber if you
respond to their message. This includes unsubscribe. Most companies
unsubscribe doesn’t work properly. There are a lot that do work, but the
“spammers” aren’t too keen to taking emails off of their lists.
4. Get a Spam filtering program. There are tons on the internet, but try to
find one that will “Bounce” Spam back to the spammers. A lot of email
software recognize “Bounced Emails” and in trying to save time and money
they automatically delete the email address or mark it as inactive in their
lists.
Remember, in order to keep your email address out of Spammers’ hands you have
to be smart and stealthy!
I hope that this article can help those of you who are having trouble with
Spam. It’s such a drag to have to take hours to check your email for all of
3 messages that are from people that you really want to read.
Thanks, and happy emailing!
Having created the outlines for FlashNewz and FLADownloads, John has become a strong voice in the Flash Community. His reviews and tutorials give great insight and knowledge to readers around the world. He has a keen eye for what’s hot and what’s not in the Flash world. He has also developed and continues to run his own flash portal as a side project to keep his mind on the Flash community
Being a key designer for advertising creative, he’s got style when it comes to grabbing readers attention. With a proven track record, there isn’t much this guy can’t handle.
