Email Spam - Tips to Keep it at Bay

Email spam is more than nuisance. Email spam causes you time and money. It does not take long for email spammers to latch onto your account and start filling your inbox. Most people are unaware of some simple strategies to avoid getting email spam. Enacting these prevention strategies will help you lessen email spam, and recapture your time and your money.

One of the things I like to do is enable domain privacy. Domain privacy keeps my contact information private. Folks scan domain records for addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Publishing this information will open yourself to unwanted solicitation. If you must publish your email, I suggest you follow the tips below.

Publishing your email address publicly on the internet gives spammers access to your address. Spammers use programs that scour the internet to find email addresses. If your email is in a known format like emailaddy@somedomain.com, then your email will be easily harvested. Humans, however, can interpret non-standard email addresses. One of the best things you can do is to remove the standard formatting in a way that allows human readers to interpret the address. One example is to change emailaddy@somedomain.com to emailaddy a t somedomain d o t com. This takes the special characters @ and. out of the email address and puts them in a non standard form that is much harder for spam programs to spot. And email spammers are going for the most bang for the buck. If your email is harder to spot, you are much less likely to be harvested. I should add that harvesters will harvest your email address in html. Some people think that having a non-descript link with the mailto:emailaddy@somedomain.com hyperlink will keep spammers from getting the address. It won't.

Another great tactic is to publish your email address in graphic form. Spam harvest programs can't (yet) read images. Simply fire up a program like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop and type out your email address. Save it as a jpeg or gif file and use that to tell the world about your email address.

If you are purchasing something online, or downloading software, and it requires an email address, always check their privacy policy. You should never blindly give out your email address. This opens you up to spam galore. But here is another great little trick. If you're a user of Gmail, Google's mail program, you can pre-pend anything you want to your email address. So, let's say you go to The Questionable Store and want to purchase something. And let's say your Gmail address is buyer@gmail.com. You could enter questionable+buyer@gmail.com as your legitimate email address. Now, if that store sells your email address to another company, you will receive email to your buyer@gmail.com address. If you view the details of the email header, it will show questionable+buyer@gmail.com as the email address. This allows you to track who is giving out your address and confront them if it goes against their Privacy Policy. Now, you can filter against that address if you do start getting spam, while keeping email that goes to your buyer@gmail.com address. You may also protect yourself by using a disposable address. Sign up for a free email address at any provider. Now, use that one when you buy stuff. That way you keep your main address safe.

No matter how careful you are, you are bound to end up with a little spam. The best advice is to set up a good spam filter. And never respond to spam email, even to unsubscribe.

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