Top Tips to avoid Email SPAM

[Yogesh]

Fed up of the Spams appearing regularly in your email accounts? Try following these 10 Tips to avoid or reduce such Spams.

1. Use a separate email address when you post messages to any public forum, such as newsgroups and mailing lists. Free email accounts from Yahoo and Hotmail are perfect for this. Never use your personal email address for this purpose: you will be flooded with spam. You can periodically check this email account to see what's spam and what isn't. A bonus is that Yahoo's spam blocker is better than those from most ISP's! And your main personal email address won't be as clogged with spam. Some ISP's, like AOL and BellSouth.net give you multiple email accounts free with your paid service.
   
   
2. Don’t give out any financial information, such as checking account and credit card numbers; and especially your social Security number; on the phone or online, unless you initiate the call and know the person or organization you’re dealing with. Don’t give that information to any stranger. In general, it is only required for medical providers, banks, mortgages and credit card companies.
   
   
3. Don't fill out the "win a vacation" and other promotions you see in stores and shopping malls. That will just get you on a junk mailing list and guarantee calls from persistent, high-pressure salesmen.
   
   
4. There are services online, some free, such as SneakeMail that provide you with disposable addresses that can be deleted if they begin to receive spam messages. The disposable email addresses forwards email to a real email address of yours, but the sender can not see this. If you create a unique address for each email newsletter or forum you subscribe to you can discard the address is it gets too much spam and just start using another email address. There are many other Disposable Email Address Services that serve this facility.
   
   
5. NEVER buy anything from a company that sends you spam. Don't even visit their sites or ask for more information. It is like feeding a stray cat. Give it one morsel of food, and it will be there all the time (and that may be fine with cats, but NO one wants spammers at the doorstep!). Remember, since they send out millions of spam emails, they only need a tiny fraction of responses to be profitable.
   
   
6. And if that doesn't convince you, consider this: the vast majority of spam "offers" are in fact scams!
   
   
7. Set up filters in your email program. Outlook does this quite easily. When you open an email and realize that it is spam, just click on Actions then Create Rule, then select an appropriate action, such as "from" then click "Move e-mail to folder" and select the "Deleted Items" folder. That's it! You'll never receive email from that particular address or subject again!
   
   
8. If you have a website, do not post your address in the HTML "mail-to" format, otherwise you will be spammed, since address-harvesting spiders (programs) extract your email address from the website and add it to the spammer's lists. Instead use feedback forms through PHP, ASP, or JSP that hide the email address, OR post the email address as a GIF (image file).
   
   
9. Use a good anti-virus software, anti-adware software and a hardware firewall on your computer, and keep them up to date. You need all three. Almost all modern Routers (Dlink, LinkSys, NetGear, Buffalo, Airlink, etc.) have a hardware firewall built in.
   
   
10. Finally, if it seems too good to be true... IT IS! No one is going to send you a pile of money from a dead Nigerian president, no lottery is going to make you a winner from a "randomly selected from a database of email addresses". Multi-level marketing IS A SCAM, ALL psychics are nothing more than conmen, and you can not make big money from "passive residual income in a few hours of your spare time each day". And there is no Easter Bunny.

For guidance regarding how to evaluate scams, visit - How to evaluate potential scams