Email spamming, which refers to sending out unsolicited bulk emails, is a chronic problem that plagues every Internet user nowadays. Similar to other spamming activities such as forum spam, blog spam and directory spam, email spam continues to grow in their sheer volume, and at the same time becomes increasingly intelligent, defeating every anti-spam technique that has been designed to fight email spam. Nowadays all major email service providers are equipped with self-trained spam filters that automatically mark spam-like emails. With the amount of time people spend online, however, email spam is something that will probably never disappear. Still there are things you can do to greatly reduce the amount of spam you receive in your inbox.
The first thing you will want to do is avoid listing your email address on your website or other public web space. Spammers have designed programs that can navigate personal web sites, public news groups or forums, and harvest email addresses posted on them. Once your email address is collected by spammers, you will begin receiving unwanted emails. To get around this problem, it is best to use a contact form on your web site to hide your email address, and not post your email address in the public web space. Spammers have become adept at spidering the Internet, and they will find your email address if you are not careful with protecting your contact information. More recently spammers get their hands on public whois database, AOL profile pages, or public chat rooms, and even use some web browser hacks to obtain web surfer’s email address without their knowledge. To be safe, it is best to never list your primary email address with newsletters, mailing lists or dubious online services.
Since email accounts are so cheap and easy to create, you should have more than one. You can have a personal account that is used to communicate with your friends or family, a business account, and an account that you need in order to sign up for online services or mailing lists. While many online services claim they won’t reveal your email address, some of them don’t live up to their promise. When you want to sign up for a service that requires your email address, you will want to use the email account that has been reserved for this purpose.
Another important tip is to avoid using common and short names for your email address. For example, many webmasters create their email address off of their domain name, and routinely use their first and last name, or some generic names such as “admin,” “info” and “webmaster” as their primary contact point. Spammers have become skilled at guessing email addresses containing such common names and words. So even if you don’t subscribe to any websites or newsletters, you may find yourself receiving a great deal of spam.
If you are running an online business, and more serious about preventing email spam, you may want to consider using more sophisticated anti-spam services such as challenge/response email filtering, high-fidelity spam blocking, or email anonymizing services. These services come with extra fees, but it may be worth the money given the amount of time you can save from not having to deal with junk emails on your own.
