Try these weapons in the war on spam
Q: I get numerous spam emails daily. Is there any way to stop this? A:
Unsolicited commercial email, commonly referred to as spam, is a problem faced by anyone who uses email with any regularity.
The first step to combatting spam is understanding how your email address became targeted.
Spammers acquire email addresses from a variety of sources. Any time you sign up on a website that requires an email address, there is a chance that the organization will use the email address to compile a list for the purposes of sending out ads and announcements. Less scrupulous organizations will sell that list to a third party, which leads to even more unwanted email.
Another way that spammers collect email addresses is to simply scour the web looking for them. If your email address is published anywhere on the internet it can be harvested by spammers who use tools that search for and record them.
Not all unwanted email is spam. Sometimes when you sign up on a website or register a piece of software, there is a check box where you can choose to receive additional information from the company. Most times the box is checked by default and you have to uncheck it to opt out of their communications.
As a rule of thumb, you should never reply to a spam email nor should you click on a link in a spam message. Doing so validates the email address as active and makes your address more valuable to spammers.
There are some exceptions to this rule. If the message is from a reputable organization and provides an unsubscribe link, you will likely be unsubscribed if you click it. You can usually tell the less than reputable senders by the content of the message.
Unfortunately, once your email address is out in the wild, it’s difficult to stem the tide of unwanted messages.
I combat spam by using Gmail as my email provider and have all of my email addresses forwarded to my Gmail account. Gmail has some very impressive spam filtering capabilities and I rarely see a spam message in my inbox. Right now, in my spam folder, I see that I have more than 10,000 messages that have been successfully intercepted.
If you have a big spam problem, I would consider a switch to a service like Gmail. You can read more about how you might approach this atcomputerhope.com/ tips/ tip133.htm.
If switching to a new email provider is too daunting, there are thirdparty, anti-spam tools that can help. Check out a program called MailWasher Pro from firetrust.com. I have used it in the past and found it to work well.
Keep in mind that this kind of tool will not help if you access your email from a web page. You will need to use a dedicated mail client like Windows Live Mail, Outlook or something similar.
For more information on spam and what you can do about it, check out spam.abuse.net.