Stop Spam

If you think about it, the minutes spent deleting these unsolicited emails add up. There is also the danger of losing legitimate emails in the swamp of junk offers.

Not only that, it can be just plain annoying!

Thankfully there are some pretty simple steps which you can take to prevent spam lists from getting your email address in the first place.

Rule #1

The most important thing you can do is to strongly protect your personal email address.

Think of it as an unlisted phone number that you only give out to the closest of your friends. You wouldn't post your unlisted phone number anywhere online (in a forum or a guest book) or give it to strangers would you?

Here's some important steps to take:

• Get a free email account (or two!). Use these to give out to everyone except your closest friends and business contacts. It takes only a minute to set up an account with hotmail.com or yahoo.com with no cost involved. Use the free email accounts to give out to everyone but your closest friends and associates.

Here are the links to sign for some free email accounts: * Hotmail * Yahoo

• Once a year, review your free email account(s). Create new free accounts and forward any of the good material in the old account to the new address. You can abandon the old address as it is probably on the spammer's lists by then. Simply continue with a brand new free account until it starts getting overrun with spam again.



• Don't post your address anywhere online. This includes forums, guest books, etc. Email Spam programs can strip addresses off of web pages to add them to their spamming lists.

  If you need to post your address, then disguise it a bit by writing out the address in a manner such as: "You can contact me by emailing me at: tim AT smallbusinesswebsite.com (replace the AT with the @ and remove the spaces!)"

• Politely ask your friends not to forward you long emails that also get forwarded to dozens of other people.

  We've all seen the "humorous" emails forwarded around with a list of 100 email addresses included. The people who create spam email databases love these. The lists can contain hundreds of email addresses all ready to by copied to a spam list.




• Use free spam stopping software such as "Mail Washer", available at http://www.mailwasher.net. This program can scan through your email before you download it. You can delete it before it even gets to you.

If you own a web site, there are additional precautions you can take:

• You can create disposable email addresses for yourself. For example, I can make up an unlimited number of addresses that start with anything and then @smallbusinesswebsite.com

  My hosting account automatically forwards everything to a legitimate account. In the event I want to "shut off" one of these made up accounts, I can easily do so by telling the email program to disable a specific address.

  This is a great way for me to find out if someone is truly respecting my wishes to not use my email address as promised.

  For example if I sign for "Bobs Newsletter" at bobsnewsletter.com I would sign using "bobsnewsletter@smallbusinesswebsite.com". If I start seeing other spam coming through from that email address, I know my privacy has not been respected as promised. (You would be surprised to see how often that happens!). I then shut down that email address.

• Use a simple javascript code to scramble up any email address that you may need to put on your site. You can use this javascript code to do this:
  <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">
  <!-- emailE=('yourname@' + 'emailserver.com')
  document.write('<A href="mailto:' + emailE + '">' + emailE + '')
  //-->
  </script>

  <NOSCRIPT> Email address protected by JavaScript.
  Please enable JavaScript to contact me. </NOSCRIPT>

• Instead of posting your email address, create a contact form on your site. You can configure it so that there is no indication of what email address the form is being sent to. This prevents it from being extracted from the html code by spam programs.

You should try to protect your primary email address as much as possible. By giving it out only very selectively, you will keep yourself off most spam email lists and not have to deal with the unwanted email.