Tips for Preventing E-mail Spam

What is E-mail Spam?

Spam is unsolicited commercial email (UCE) that you have received through no action of your own. Your email address is initially obtained thru online forms, web spiders, mailing lists, or bought from companies and individuals that specialize in collecting email addresses.

How Can I Prevent Spam?

Tip 1: Maintain two email addresses. The first one use ONLY with trusted parties, people you directly do business with, and friends. This will be your primary address. Then set up a secondary email address. Use it for filling out forms on web sites, joining mailing lists, making purchases online, and posting on the web -- these are some of the places that your email address is collected for receiving spam.

After a few months, if you start getting lots of spam to your secondary address, simply delete it and set up a new secondary address (a competent web site administrator can set this up in no time). If you use your email addresses correctly your primary address will get little or no SPAM at all. I have personally been using the same primary address for about 3 years and I get about 2 or 3 SPAM emails a day.

Additionally, to keep things organized, you can also configure your mail client (i.e. Outlook) to separate the email accounts into different folders.

To recap:

Primary Email Address:

• Friends & relatives
• Trusted business and personal contacts
• Trusted companies that do not send unsolicited emails

Secondary Email Address

• Use on web site subscriptions and mailing lists
• Use on any online forms
• Online purchases
• Posting in online Forums
• Anywhere else where the recipient of your email address is suspect

Tip 2: Never click on an unsubscribe link unless you trust the sender 100%. When you click on 'unsubscribe' you are essentially telling the senders "Hey, I received your spam email, you successfully reached me ". A valid email address is the most important resource for a spammer, not only can they sell it and successfully spam you, but it also saves them money in the future since they don't waste as much bandwidth attempting to send email to undeliverable addresses. Typically when you click on an unsubscribe link, spammers will take you off one marketing list just to add you to another. They can also compile all the confirmed-received emails into one master list which they just go and sell to another spammer!

Tip 3: Avoid using the preview pane in Outlook. The preview pane automatically displays HTML emails which may contain images that covertly send information back to the spammer. As the same time you start seeing images load in the preview pane, the spammer may be getting a little notice which says "my email reached that recipient". Outlook 2003 seems to prevent this problem by blocking the display of images unless you click on a link, although i'm not sure if they are actually preventing the download of that image, or just it's display.

Tip 4: Use client-side spam filtering applications. There are about a million of them out there. Outlook 2003 has SPAM filtering built in and seems to work fairly well on the lowest filtering setting.

Tip 5: Ask your web host to set up server-side SPAM filtering applications. Aside from the MAPS blacklists which can be incorporated to work with most major email servers, there are additional applications like SpamAssassin, CRM114, Milter which can be integrated to work with your web host's email server.

Here are some of the more popular SPAM filtering applications available: