Protect Yourself from Spam

Stop the flood of spam in your Inbox

Unsolicited commercial email (spam) is a sad fact of life on today's Internet. While there's no perfect solution that will keep your email mailbox clean, there are many simple steps you can take to alleviate the problem.

Protect Your Email Address Online

Many spammers operate "bots": autonomous software robots that "crawl" the Web looking for email addresses. If you post your email address publicly anywhere online (on a website, a discussion forum, on USENET, in a guestbook etc.) then sooner or later it will be found by one of these bots and will then get added to a spam mailing list. These harvested email addresses are commonly bundled by the millions onto CDs, which spammers then use to send out their unwanted messages.

ADVICE:

Choose a Non-Obvious Email Address

Some spammers find email addresses by generating likely combinations using automated tools. For example, they may generate a list like aaaaa@hotmail.com, aaaab@hotmail.com, aaaac@hotmail.com and so on. They also make use of word lists and lists of first names and surnames to generate likely email addresses.

Of course, most of the email addresses generated automatically using these techniques won't actually exist, but spammers don't care since email is so cheap to send out.

ADVICE:

The following articles provide additional pointers as to how you can fend off spam.

 

Free Email Address Directory