How To Stop Spam
(Especially If You're Already a Victim)
Spam. Those annoying, time-consuming emails that clog
your Inbox and ruin your day. You wonder: How did it ever get so bad?
While it's not possible to completely eliminate spam, there are quite
a few things you can do about the problem to reduce your
burden.
Spam is defined as an unsolicited email trying to get you to buy something.
In addition, it's email that tries to get you to give up something:
your credit card number, social security number, login ID, etc., by
pretending to be a legitimate email. Here are some tips for stopping
the current spam you're getting, and avoiding getting on new spam lists.
1. Maintain two email addresses: a Personal Email Address
(that you give to family, friends and business associates) personal
one, and a Safe Email Address (one you use whenever you're ordering
something online, signing up for an email newsletter, or creating a
profile on a website).
For instance, I use a Hotmail account for my Safe Email Address. If
a spammer were to get a hold of that address, fine. All the spam will
go into my Hotmail account, which I only look at once a week. Hotmail
has a great anti-spam filter built in, so it's easy to see what's spam
and what's not. This practice leaves my personal email account relatively
spam-free (maybe I get two spam emails a day to my personal account).
Some free email services include Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail (Google's
new email service).
2. Use your Safe Email Address to send emails to companies
who might be harvesting email addresses from incoming emails. For example,
say you want to write to a company to ask them about their products.
Some companies will harvest your email address from the email you send
to them, and put you on their mailing list. By using your Safe Email
Address, you can avoid seeing messages from these companies come to
your
personal email address.
3. Stop giving your email address to everyone who wants
it. Does your local bank really need your email address? Does your grocery
store need it? Just because someone asks
for it doesn't mean you have to give it to them. If it's a non-local
company, or you are signing up for a mailing list, then they probably
do need it. But it's okay to leave the
email address blank when filling out forms. Always ask yourself, Do
I want to be contacted by this company via email? (Speaking of mailing
lists, make sure the companies you subscribe to have a public, posted
Privacy Statement on their website.)
4. Do not put your Personal Email Address on your website. Instead,
use a form so that your email address is hidden. However, some spammers
use special software that looks at the HTML code hidden in the form
to steal your email address, so using a form by itself isn't always
the safest route. Better yet, use a free Form Processor so that your
email address is never even in the HTML coding on your pages. The service
I use is Bravenet's Form processor (www.bravenet.com). You can see ours
in action here:
http://www.passionforbusiness.com/send-email.htm
5. Never buy anything that's sent through a spam email.
First, it just encourages them to continue to spam. Second, it tells
them that your email address is accurate, and they
can then sell that address to someone else.
6. Never reply to spam and ask to be unsubscribed. They'll
just ignore it anyway, and it tells them that your email address is
accurate, which just keeps you on the list.
Note: many legitimate emails newsletters and mailing lists use automated
unsubscribe links at the bottom of their emails, and you CAN use these
to get off of mailing lists.
7. Use anti-spam software, like Norton Internet Security,
on your own PC to filter spam as it comes into your email system. You
still receive the spam, but it gets filtered to a Junk Mail or Bulk
Mail folder, and segregates the spam from the legitimate email. Most
anti-spam filters need to be trained, however, so you'll have to occasionally
tell the filter that something is NOT spam that it inadvertently put
into the Junk Mail folder. Many of these anti-spam filters work on the
principle of White Lists (legitimate email addresses that you DO want
to receive email from) and Black Lists (spammer email addresses that
you do NOT want to receive email from). Learn how to train your anti-spam
software and it will work wonders for you.
8. Check to see if your ISP or hosting company has anti-spam
technology in place, to catch spam before it even hits your Inbox. Be
careful, though, because sometimes these
filters are over-zealous and you have to train it to accept emails from
mailing lists that you have subscribed to.
9. Do not use a catch-all email address. A catch-all
email address is set up if you have your own website, and it is intended
to catch all of the incoming emails sent to your
domain even if there is no legitimate mailbox by that name. For example,
your email address might be mary@mydomain.com. If that mailbox is set
up as a catch all, and someone sends an email to marie@mydomain.com
(with a spelling mistake in the email name), it will be forwarded to
mary@mydomain.com. However, spammers know about catch-all email addresses,
and will take your domain name (mydomain.com) and add common prefixes
to it, like info@ or admin@. If you have a catch-all, then those spamming
emails will come to you, even if you don't have a legitimate mailbox
of info@mydomain.com or admin@mydomain.com set up with your hosting
company. See how easy it is for spammers to get to you?
10. Finally, if spam is really bad, create a new personal
email address for yourself, tell everyone about the new address (give
them several reminders that you are changing
email addresses), then delete the old personal email address. This may
seem a little drastic, but if you receive 200 spam emails a day, it
might be time to time this final step to eradicate it.
You are not powerless against spam. But you do have to take action
to fight back.
Don't let them bully you into accepting hundreds of unwanted emails
a day! Take action now to reclaim your Inbox!
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© 2004 Karyn Greenstreet.
Karyn Greenstreet is a Self Employment
expert and small business coach. She shares tips, techniques and
strategies with self-employed people to boost clarity and focus,
create sustainable motivation, and increase sales and profits.
Visit her website at www.PassionForBusiness.com
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