How to Get Rid of Spam

Spam in our inbox often feels like an inevitability of using the internet. Use it long enough, and unwanted messages begin to flood our emails. You may even eventually become worried about accidentally getting a virus or unwanted software from such emails. Over time, some email accounts can feel unusable; there's no way to find the personal and business messages we want through the spam. But if you follow these steps, you'll be well on your way to a clean, pleasant email experience.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Consider having more than one email account: one for friends and family, and one for your other internet exploits. Any time you need to sign up with an online service, use the secondary email. This ensures that if that information is sold to spammers, it's at least not flooding the inbox you go to in order to read personal mail. This "spam trunk" email is one you only check when you sign up for something, making it easy to tell what is and isn't spam. There's no need to fear accidentally deleting a friend email from this account.

2. When posting your email on websites or in social networking systems, type it out as email @ domain . com OR email (at) domain (dot) com
   
   This prevents spam bots from being able to copy your email from the webpage and add it to their database. Most users know to remove the spaces or change the (at) and (dot) to @ and .

3. Make use of your email provider's filter function. Some of them are better than others, but if you get email you know is spam, use the built in functions to mark it as spam. This will prevent more emails like it from entering your inbox.

4. Some "spam" isn't technically spam-- if your inbox is plagued with newsletters from services you've signed up with, you need to unsubscribe from those newsletters in order to get them to stop appearing. Most have this option at the bottom of each email in tiny, itty bitty text.

5. Facebook or MySpace comment notifications can also flood one's box easily. Remember that social networking sites have an option to turn this off. Go to your settings page on those websites and turn off email notifications to keep them out of your inbox.

6. If you have a friend who forwards a lot of emails and chain letters to you and find this obnoxious, sadly there is not much you can do aside from politely telling them to stop forwarding you this type of message. You're on your own for this one.

Tips & Warnings

• There are many ways to get free accounts if you want to try the multiple account strategy, such as gmail or Yahoo!.