Reducing Junk Email – New Spam Prevention Tips

Reducing junk e-mail “spam” has become the most common question I receive from customers. Here I will list my latest tips to help you avoid getting overwhelmed with the junk e-mail. Remember when you first got your email address – you probably got little to no spam? The longer you have you address the more likely you are to get spam – and the amount increases over time.

• Use several email addresses. Most Internet Service Providers let you create several email addresses and you can also create free accounts through Yahoo or Google. Use one address that you only give out to close friends and family. A second one you give to businesses or companies when you order online. Another one for newsletter subscriptions or mailing lists. To keep your personal, business and newsletter e-mail more organized and separated, most e-mail programs (such as Outlook or Outlook Express) or email providers will let you setup filters that can automatically move mail addressed to your different email accounts into separate folders.

• Make it a habit to use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) when sending email to more than one person – and tell your friends too. Using BCC helps prevent Spambots and viruses from spreading junk email. Read more about how to use BCC and why here.

• Local spam filtering programs have become ineffective. Some spam doesn’t get blocked – other legitimate mail gets put in the spam/junk/bulk folder. Blocking senders is waste of time, since most spam now comes from randomly generated fake email addresses and it’s unlikely that you will get spam from the same random address again.

• Use an e-mail service with good spam filters – Yahoo and Fusemail are 2 of my favorite email service providers. Though occasionally they will wrongly identify spam and non-spam, Fusemail has several filtering options that lets you fine-tune your specific needs.

• Use a service that uses ‘whitelist’ and “challenge/response” filtering which only puts emails from known or verified senders in your Inbox. Anyone else that tries to send you e-mail will first have to respond to a one-time confirmation message and verify that they are a real person trying to send you a message. Once they respond to the verification message, that sender is put in your whitelist of approved/verified senders and future emails will be put in your Inbox without delay. Since spam emails are most often from random and invalid email addresses or from spoofed addresses – a spammer in not likely going to respond to a verification request. Fusemail (mentioned above) features whitelist and challenge/response filtering.

• Change your email address – and change it each year using the year as a suffix. As I mentioned above, when you first got your email address you likely had little or no spam. If you change your email address yearly you start off each year fresh and spam-free. You can notify your friends that beginning with each new year your email address will change to something ending in the year (i.e. joesmith2007@yahoo.com). But Spambots likely won’t figure out that change and will just keep sending it’s junk to your old “2006” address.

• Use Gmail’s + addressing – Gmail has a unique feature where you can add a “+[anything]” to your email address which will be delivered to you. You can then use a filter to automatically sort emails sent to a + address. For more details see this link.