Prevent Spam in Your E-mail Inbox
What four-letter word do internet users hate the most? Spam. Everyone is annoyed by unsolicited e-mail messages promoting miracle diets, get rich quick schemes, amazing beauty products, and more. Believe it or not, your behavior has likely played a big role in determining who has access to your e-mail address, including spammers. Here are a few ways to reduce the amount of spam attacking your inbox:
- Preview your messages before you open them. If you can tell that the message is spam simply from the subject line, don't open it รข?? simply delete it. Many e-mail accounts allow you to use a preview mode to peek at the contents of a message before actually opening it. In Outlook, go to View>Preview Pane. Click the message just once to view the message in your preview pane without opening it.
- Never respond to spam messages. If you reply or even click the "unsubscribe" link, it informs your spammer that you read your mail and your address is valid. As a result, you may receive even more junk mail.
- Don't click links in a spam e-mail. Spammers can often identify that you (and only you) clicked their link because of multiple unique pages on their sites.
- Don't forward e-mails from someone you don't know to a list of people in your address book. Spammers love to harvest e-mail addresses from the "forward this to 20 of your friends" e-mail messages, even when the sender of the original e-mail didn't intend for this to happen.
- Opt out. If you register your e-mail at a web site that sends out commercial messages, they should give you a choice whether you want to receive e-mail from the site or its third party partners. Always check the NO box.
- Protect your e-mail address. Reserve a private e-mail address that is given out only to friends, family, etc. Create a separate e-mail address to request more information, post on discussion groups, web sites, blogs, chat rooms, or anything else that is posted on the web.
- Never use e-mail addresses as your screen name. This makes it very easy for web crawlers to find your address.
- Use spam filters. Many e-mail programs have built-in tools to block messages sent from certain e-mail addresses or filter messages based on keywords you define. In Outlook, click on Actions>Junk E-mail>Add Sender to Blocked Senders List.
- Remove your e-mail address from directories. To prevent your e-mail address from being harvested from people finder services such as Yahoo! People Search and other directories that are goldmines for spammers, ask them to remove your name from their directory. Or update your address using your "public" e-mail address instead of your "private" friends/family account.
