How to avoid Email Spam

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

 

So you are getting lot of unwanted emails. The most common ones that have been there since ages are ones for credit cards, loans and various pills. These spammers get our email address due to our mistake. Email address harvesting is increasing day by day and not many of us are really trying to avoid it.

 

What is email address harvesting?

 

There are various programs or so called bots which keep visiting websites all day and night in search of email addresses. The bots are programmed in such a manner that whenever they visit a website and find an email address, they immediately save it in their database. Now how do they know its an email address? Simple! The @ sign in your email address and the link which has an a href tag with mailto:. I see lot of designers still use it which can be very dangerous. If you think you are a good designer then you will not be designing a webpage with such email code.

 

The alternative way and the way which will not let email harvesters spam you is by putting an email address like harry[at]harry-inc.com. A person reading this understands what the email address is. Lot of webmasters also use an image to display their email address. You need to be careful here if you have a Gmail account. You are not allowed to use the official Gmail logo in your image. Many people have been doing this and are warned by Google already. These are 2 simple ways to avoid email harvesters and in turn avoid spam.

 

Do not share your email address

 

You would find many websites which ask for your email address without a reason. These websites will do nothing but save your email address in their database and  spam the hell out of you. So the nest time you enter your email address anywhere, please be careful.

 

Do not open unwanted emails

 

Nowadays, spammers have a system in place where they know whether a user has opened an email. As soon as they know that you have opened the email they know you are the right person to send more spam to. Always try and delete these spam emails without reading them. You need to be smart to guess which ones are spam and which ones are legit.

 

Use the spam filters

 

Always use the spam filters and tell your email client whether an email is a spam or genuine. Anytime you get an email in your inbox which is wrongly treated as genuine, just click the button that says ‘This is Spam’ or something like that. This will help noone but you and next time the email wont be in your inbox.

 

I have an email id which is myfirstname[at]yahoo.com since 1998. I hardly get any spam on it because the way I share my email address and spam filters I use.

 

 

Popularity: 7% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!