I have yet to meet anyone who isn’t bothered by SPAM. I’d bet that even SPAMmers hate SPAM … from other SPAMmers anyway!

So what exactly is SPAM? Most people will agree that SPAM is unsolicited email. However, if you didn’t read the fine print at that web site you ordered from or rushed through the sign up for that new login you can’t live without and left a box checked that said “it’s ok to send me stuff” then you simply got what you asked for. These kinds of mailings, while you might find annoying, are not technically SPAM and in these cases, it’s ok to simply unsubscribe or log back into your account and check out your preferences or email settings or whatever they happen to be calling it today!

That said, on to the subject at hand. Here are some tips on how you can reduce the amount of SPAM you receive. No one has figured out a way to eliminate it, at least not yet, so, until then, read on…

1. Never, ever, ever click on a link in a SPAM message, especially one that says “click here to unsubscribe,” you’ll just be confirming your email address and opening the floodgates. Remember what I said above about what is SPAM!
2. Never, ever, ever reply to a SPAM message for the same reasons as above.
3. Try to avoid even opening a SPAM message because if it’s written in HTML and includes graphics, those graphics loading can confirm your email address just as if you’d clicked on a link yourself. If you must see what’s in that email, open it in a mail reader that can prevent or block the loading of external images or in SPAM stopping software that will only show you text.
4. Make an effort to avoid posting your email address on newsgroups, forums, chat rooms, guestbooks, blog comments, etc. SPAMmers use robots just like the search engines except these harvest email addresses.
5. Use two email addresses. One for posting on forums, etc. and one for your “real” correspondence.
6. Make your email address unique. Having an address like john@ is just going to make it easy for a SPAMmer. Once they find your domain name, which is so easy when it’s a service like hotmail or yahoo which SPAMmers already love, it’s simply a matter of sending SPAM to every name in the book. Of course, having an email address of j0hen233@ isn’t going to be easy for anyone to remember. This is where you need to find a happy medium, and one you can live with.
7. If you post your email address on your web site, encrypt it. This may only work for a while before the SPAMmers catch up to the encryption technology, but it’s something.
8. Use software to filter out SPAM. Mail reader software like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird have built in SPAM filters or add-ons that you can install to help manage your SPAM. Some flag the message with a [SPAM] tag to help you further filter them or just manually delete them. Some move suspicious emails to a bulk or SPAM folder where you have to go through them later and tell the software whether they are SPAM or not and/or delete them from there. There are also applications available that are not built into your email software but work with it just like your virus scan does. Personally, Marilyn and I use a piece of software called Spamihilator. We’ve used it for quite a number of years now and have found it to be quite helpful.
9. Use a service to filter out SPAM. There are services available that can filter your email before it reaches your mailbox. These services connect directly with your web site’s mail server. One such service is SpamStopsHere which has been used quite successfully by one of our clients for more than a year now.

And, finally, here’s something for you to keep in mind. Please be gentle with that “report as SPAM” or “report abuse” button or your instinctual desire to get back at the SPAMmer. Most SPAMmers forge the from email address, they also forge the headers of the message. This makes it difficult for anyone to tell where the message actually originated. Anyone with a web site can become the victim of a SPAMmer and have their email address “hijacked” and used to send out thousands or even millions of messages. Then, that poor web site owner is victimized yet again when his domain is reported as a SPAMmer and he finds himself on blacklists or blocked by ISPs.