Rayboy

 

Being in the IT industry , i have been involved in fighting spam. we predicted years ago that the spam problem would quickly get out of control. And, of course, it has.

Many or All of us get thousands of spam messages a day. In fact, We  being into managing hosting services, we gets many more than that.So, it’s not surprising that people need relief — they want to do whatever they can to stop spam.  Some are ready to invest into Computer systems costing 20,000 to 50,000 USD.

Unfortunately, many of us now spend so much time filtering and deleting spam that our biggest concern has become that we not lose messages we really want.

Many double opt-in email newsletters are being incorrectly filtered, so recipients who sign up never know they’ve been sent. And even personal communication and one-on-one email is now regularly being filtered at the server level. In fact, according to a recent article in Time Magazine, between 40% to 70% of all email is currently getting blocked by spam filters! That means recipients never have a chance to read it.

So, the cure has become as bad as the disease. This is especially true of some filtering solutions with over-zealous criteria.  Nevertheless, this Guide is about how to stop spam. So, here are some good tips that will help you dramatically reduce the amount of spam you receive.

Using these tips and resources, most of my client,friends and Family have reduced the amount of spam we get by over 55%.
—————————

1. I would recommend you have 3 email accounts.  1 Personal(or Business) , 1 for confirmed newletters, online registration sites and forums which you need to be contacted on. and the last one for everything else registering online on unknown websites etc. Use the 3rd email address when you post messages to any public forum, such as newsgroups and mailing lists. Never use your personal email address for this purpose — or you’ll be flooded with spam. Then, you can quickly go through the email in this account to see what’s spam and what isn’t. And your main personal email address won’t be as clogged with spam.
2. If you have already been spammed from many forums, try unsubscribing from all of them

3. If you have your own website or blog. never put your email or company email directly there as a text format. You could put it there as an image or just as ” Name ( at ) domain.com ”

4. Never reply a spam. When you reply a spam, the spam sender, confirms that it went to a confirmed “Human” user. 80% of the times , your spam will increase.

5. Try getting a spam prevention software , like if your hosting provider , gives you one then good. But if not, you can get for your email clients like www.antispamsniper.com , which is quite good.
6. Filter your email. Using filters is key to managing your email effectively. It may take a short time to figure out how to do this, but it’s definitely worthwhile.

Tip: Make sure that any software or system you select gives YOU control of which email you get (and doesn’t automatically erase messages).

7. Do not go posting around your emails on every forum , or blog you see, its best you put your 3rd email account , if you really need to display it out.

8. When you receive forwards, from friends and families, which you in turn forward. Its always advisable to delete everyone’s  email addresses which also in turn get forwarded.  I personally receive forwards from friends which has been forwarded-forwarded-forwarded and has around 100 Email address …

9. When you forward to so many users, its best advisable to put all your friends and families into BCC field. so that the addresses are not known.

10. For New users. Its best not to make your email too simple , which spammers can guess.. for example . if your name is John Smith .. dont create an account called JohnSmith@domain.com, rather make it difficult to guess like J.smith@domain.com or JohnS@domain.com or something more creative , which only you and your contacts will remmeber

11. Avoid Microsoft Products like Outlook express. (No offense Microsoft) . but products like outlook express is highly attacked by viruses, trojans etc, which steal yours and your contacts email addresses. Use Softwares like BAT, Eudora etc. If you believe in free products then you can use Thunderbird from Firefox (mozilla)

If missed out anything , do comment.