December 5th, 2006
by Sunil Setty
If you are like me – a frequent computer user – you are likely getting bombarded of late by spam email. It’s never-ending it seems.
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The problem has gotten so out of hand of late that a recent study found spam email to be more annoying than postal direct mail. When you think about it it’s not really that surprising given you check your “snail mail” once a day whereas many of us check our email every hour if not every minute. Meaning plenty more chances to get annoyed.
So how do you fight all this spam onslaught? Here are a few things I do to cut down.
Never post your email address anywhere on a web page
That means don’t post it on a classifieds site, message board/forums, blogs, guestbooks or really anywhere that can be visibly seen on the web. Unless of course you want spam. So anytime a form asks for an email address that will be displayed on a web page don’t use your primary email address. Instead, if you have to post your email on a web page set up a secondary email address on Gmail, Yahoo or another free service which you can then set to forward incoming non-spam mail to your primary, private email.
Don’t check the box
When you are buying merchandise on the web uncheck or leave blank the “Send me more info” box usually found somewhere during the order checkout process. That is unless you really want to receive more info about the seller’s products. Many reputable companies don’t use the email address you order with to send spam, but some do no doubt. So why take the chance?
No reply at all
Don’t replay to any spam, ever. That’s right. Just delete it. Don’t even open it and especially don’t reply. Many of these spammers are hoping that you do reply because if you do it is then confirmed that the email they have on you has a live body on the other end. And then you’ll likely get only more spam email! That includes the spam which has the “Reply to unsubscribe to the stop getting this email” pasted at the bottom. And don’t worry, that dude in Africa who says he’ll send you the millions he has provided you just send him you bank account info won’t take it the wrong way. If fact he can’t take it the wrong way because he doesn’t exist!
Fight back, apply spam filters
If your server or email client has a spam filter, put it to work. Most anti-spam programs offer a filter which allows you to identify, block and automatically delete emails which contain words of your choosing. So if you get a lot of unwanted mortgage emails, just add the term “mortgage” to your filter and you should stop receiving those mortgage spam emails. The program I use which works quite well is Spam Assassin (SA). SA allows you to filter emails while “learning” through repetition the difference between spam and non-spam messages. With SA I’ve cut my email spam from three figures (over 100!) to single digits a day (under 10!).
Of course if you are already inundated with spam emails, guess what? It’s probably too late to do much now (except for applying filters) because there’s no known way to “get off” the spam list. Once you’re on it, you’re on it for life! Sad but true. So best thing to do is to get a new email, use some caution and follow the steps above. Good luck!
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