How to Protect Yourself From Spam

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

If your reading this you probably already have everything you need.

Step 1

Spam. We all hate those thousands of emails we get each day that have nothing to do with what we have a email address for. According to various security sites on the web the average email user gets approximately 1400 spam emails in any given twenty-four hour period, 365 days a year and this number is increasing monthly. In this article we are going to discuss a strategy that works for me to get rid of about 99.9% of my 2000 spam messages a day. I've had the same email address for four years now and was about to just switch over until the company improved its handling of spam messages on the server side. During this time I did learn a few tricks to keep from getting spammed. You will notice I am fond of Google Gmail. I'm sure these same tactics can be used on just about any email service of your choice.
Step 2

The first thing I did was get a honey pot email address. Much like its relative the honey pot server, the honey pot email address is a account I send all new people I deal with on the internet for a few weeks to see if I'm going to get spammed from them. After a few weeks if the company I added to that account is not showing signs of being a spammer, I switch the email address over to my Google Gmail account and assign it to its particular filter. I use Yahoo mail as my honey pot account.
Step 3

The second thing I do, I never delete spam from my Gmail in folder. I always check it and click the spam button so it registers with google as being reported as spam. With millions of users reporting spam daily, spammers are identified quickly and in my experience Google Gmail automatically identifies about 99.9% of the spam coming to your address. The only reason for using the honey pot email address is so your spam folder in your main email account has such a small amount of spam that you can easily look and check to see if google was overly aggressive in declaring any of your wanted email as spam.
Step 4

The third thing I do, I use a disposable email address for everyday email requests. Due to everyone and his mother wanting to build a email list, you have to enter your email address to use just about any website now. I've never been fond of this practice as I know why they ask for it. Some day, some time your going to get spam from that website. So when downloading software, signing up for forums, and just about every other place I know I'm only going to go once, I use a service like Mailinator. Mailinator lets you create your own email address with a variety of domains that you can use immediately. Mailinator even has a widget you can put on your personal web page that will show you the email messages currently in your box. Mailinator works by only keeping the email messages in your box for a few hours so this is a great service for when you have to enter your email address to get access to a website immediately. Mailinator is so popular that some places will not allow you to use a email address with a domain controlled by them. However they have plenty of domains and I have never came across a website that blocked them all. I created a widget for my email address on each domain and copied the code over to a personal web page on my PC that I can bring up at anytime to see who is sending emails. The only bad thing about Mailinator is that anyone who knows your email address can access it on the Mailinator website. Mailinator does not require you to enter a password to check your address.
Step 5

Using just these three methods you should be able to get virtually 100% of the spam you get to the place it belongs, the trash can.