How to Avoid Spam in Your Inbox

Junk email is one of the most annoying things you could get in your inbox, especially when you have been monitoring it regularly for that long-awaited email.

However, there are things you can do to protect your inbox from these kinds of messages, and to avoid the risk of downloading a computer virus because of spam.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Stop the spammers from getting your email address in the first place. Do not divulge your email address publicly on websites, forums, blogs, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook. If you feel that you must divulge your email, create a separate Hotmail or Gmail account, which you can use and distribute. However, be careful when putting your full name or any sort of personal information with the account. I would recommend using an alias, as spammers can also be looking for opportunities to steal your identity.

2. Never open a spam email. If you have opened it, never click unsubscribe. Not only will this not unsubscribe you, but it will also confirm that you do exist and that you open your emails. You will only get bombarded with even more spam.

3. Some freemail companies will allow you to report spam mail, which blacklists its senders, for example, Hotmail. Make sure to always report the spam to these companies, that way you're helping diminish the amount of spam going around.
   
   I'm not sure how effective this is (as spammers can just get new email addresses), but at least you know you've done something to hinder the spammers.

4. Train the anti-spam features on your email programs. Thunderbird (from Mozilla) and Apple Mail are two email programs that allow you to 'blacklist' spam you receive until they know what email messages are spam and which ones are genuine. Once you've filtered several dozen messages, you can set the program to move all suspected spam to a junk email fonder.

5. Don't fill out 'win a vacation' kinds of promotions online. This will just voluntarily get you in an email spam list. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Reputable companies will usually not give you a valuable prize in exchange for your email.

Tips & Warnings

• If the spammers already have your email address, they are going to keep it. The only solution to this problem is to stop using the old email address, and create a new one. Once that is done, do not divulge the new email address.
• No one will write you an email from Nigeria (or any other location in the world) offering you money.
• Similarly, no one will pay you to give English lessons to their child without having even met you first, so depositing any amount of money in their account as a 'trust' measure won't work either. There is no such thing as easy money.

[waters]

on 7/24/2009 Good article on how to avoid spam in your inbox.

[dorigillman]

on 7/22/2009 great article. i agree with doban. i always unsubscribe from things.

[apayne902]

on 7/22/2009 I didn't know you could even unsubscribe!

[doban]

on 7/22/2009 I did not know that "unsubscribing" just made it worse. Thanks for the information.