How to Prevent Spam Email From Flooding Your Inbox

Spam messages are very annoying. They continuously flood email accounts everyday with unsolicited commercial and advertising messages, promising better health, offering free products, providing tips how to get rich quickly or informing you that you've won the lottery. If you get tired of constantly receiving spam messages in your email inbox, you can follow a few tips to curtail your receiving them.

Instructions

1. Never reply to spam emails or click on any links within the email itself. It's best to delete them right away rather than replying to spam emails. You can usually identify spam messages from an unknown sender's email address, the catchy title and the message body which promise something too good to be true. Also, refrain from clicking on the "Unsubscribe" link in any part of the message. It doesn't stop the spam messages from coming to you. Rather, it verifies and confirms that your email address is valid and you'll most likely receive more spam emails.

2. Beware of listing your email address on any Web site. To check if your email address is visible to spammers online, type your email address in a Web search engine. If you find one or several instances of your email addresses displayed, remove it if it's possible or create a new one and inform your contacts of the change. Once your email address is already in the spammer's mailing list, you'll receive increasing amounts of spam.

3. Be careful when signing up for free offers or joining a mailing list. Check to see if you can opt out receiving unsolicited emails after signing up. Read the site's privacy statement very carefully. Some online services requires you to register with their cosponsors. You will realize later that your name and email address have been sent to online marketers and sold to others. It's best to create a separate email address for this purpose so you don't flood your personal email with unwanted spams.

4. Install anti-spam software in your computer. This software filters out unsolicited email messages from flooding your inbox. Look for reliable anti-spam software either for free or for a minimal fee. Read reviews online before downloading or purchasing them.

5. If you're building a free website on a free Web host, refrain from putting your email address in plain text on your site. Disguise your email address by leaving out periods and the "@" symbol. For example, instead of writing [e-mail], write it as "abc AT yahoo DOT com". This tricks online website crawling programs from stealing your email address and selling it to spammers.

6. Setup two or more email addresses, one for personal email correspondence with friends and colleagues and other email addresses used for subscribing to newsletters, posting to forums or receiving freebies. Make your email addresses complex since spammer's software targets easy and obvious addresses. This will decrease your chances of receiving spam messages.

7. Preview messages received before opening them. Many email clients have a preview mode to give you a peek of the email content before actually opening them. This saves you the time reading unimportant messages and worse -- opening up attachments containing viruses that harm your computer.

8. Use an Internet browser with built-in security system such as Mozilla Firefox that prevents malicious codes from being installed in your computer without your knowledge. The malicious codes do keyword logging and send email address, passwords and even bank IDs to the programmer who came up with the code. This not only threatens your security, it also increases the spam coming in to your email account as your information is sold to outside parties.

References

• TechSoup; Things You Can Do to Prevent Spam; Susan Tenby; Nov. 12, 2007

Resources

• Intranet Journal; DIY Tips for a Spam-Free Inbox; Guy Roberts; Jan. 25, 2007
• Spam Laws: There's Spam in Your Anti-Spam Software - The Precautions