Tips for reducing or eliminating spam to your personal email address
1 - Keep one email address for very personal use only. This is the email address that only your family and closest friends will know. Don’t use it for any other purpose.
2 - Use “throw away” email addresses for all your online activities. That way if any one email address becomes overwhelmed with spam you can just delete the address.
If you have your own website with a good number of available email addresses, you can set up a new email address for each of your online groups. You can either use numbers (me1@mysite.com, me2@mysite.com, me3@mysite.com, etc) which you’ll have to keep track of, or more descriptive names (spamstopping@mysite.com, yahoogroup@mysite.com, etc). If you start getting a lot of spam you’ll know exactly where it is coming from. You can then change your email address at the group and set the email address to discard all incoming email.
Alternatively, you can set up a series of email addresses at a free provider such as yahoo mail or hotmail and just close down the account when spam becomes overwhelming.
There are services that provide disposable email addresses, for example, sneakemail.com and mailinator.com.
3 - Use nonstandard or unusual email addresses that are harder to guess, especially if your email address is provided by a major ISP (like AOL or Comcast) or one of the popular free email providers (like Yahoo and Hotmail).
Some amount of spam comes from “dictionary attacks”. Spammers send to lists of guesses that include all first names and common email address words (like webmaster@, admin@, etc). If you use an email address like ann@hotmail.com you’re much more likely to appear on the randomly generated list than if you use something like a-xx234TPrsm-14@hotmail.com.
4 - If you participate in online chats and discussion groups don’t use a screenname that is the same as your email address. Spammers harvest usernames from chat rooms and add the major email add domains, guessing that they’ll reach a good number of email addresses that way too. If your chat name is “punky” and your email address is “punky@yahoo.com” you’ll likely find your email inundated with spam.
5 - Don’t respond to or forward any of those chain email messages you receive. Aside from the fact that they are a form of spam, many of the email lists that are generated by the chain end up in the hands of spammers.
6 - Never respond to a spam email and never click on any of the links in the email, including unsubscribe links. Responding in any way identifies the email address as a “live” email that someone is reading and makes the email address more valuable when being sold on email lists.
(Note: It’s always safe to use the unsubscribe link in an email that you are sure you opted to recede - those are sent by legitimate emailers who will respect your wish to be removed from their mailing lists)
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