Spam Prevention Tips

Spam is one of the worlds biggest threats to time management and productivity. If not careful, your email can end up on some of the biggest spam lists and the time spent weeding through and deleting spam can kill precious time and even bandwidth. Not to mention the possibility of accidentally deleting legitimate emails in the process which has its own sets of consequences. Here are some of the best spam prevention spam.

Use a Separate Email for Sign-ups

One of the main ways your email can end up on a spam list is if you, just once, sign up for a free offer or a newsletter at the wrong website. The best solution is to have a separate email address from your main email just for signing up to things online such as email subscriptions or offers. You can have the email redirect to your main email account. If that email ends up on a spam list, then you can easily change it without having to change your main email address, and we know what a headache that is.

Never Open a Spam Email

Spam emails are more and more becoming sly in figuring out whether an email address belongs to a real person. One of the ways is to include attachments and images or other code right in the body of the email. If you see a spam email then your should delete it asap and never open. Otherwise your email will be flagged as legitimate leading to even more spam.

Take Advantage of a Spam Filter

All good hosting providers offer a spam filter as part of their email and Web hosting service. The spam filter is available through the Webmail service of your email account. You are then able to block and delete at server level emails with obvious spam characteristics such as “from” address and name, “body” content, etc. You can then filter words like “viagra”, “porn”, “casino”, “erection”, etc., you get the idea. Ask your hosting provider how to access Webmail and spam filter on your account.

Use Common Sense

Only sign up on websites that are legitimate and have clearly spelled out privacy policies and that don’t look spammy. Don’t respond to ads that sound too good to be true on websites such as Craig’s List and others. Spammers use ads with incredible sounding offers to get unsuspecting individuals to respond and then the item is suddenly not available but the email is already revealed to the spammer. It cannot be overstated: never ever respond to spam emails, not even to demand to be removed. It will only encourage more spam.

Photo by Brett Stone: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-a-person-using-a-gray-laptop-computer-2874782/