It is virtually impossible to avoid having your email address end up on a spammer’s mailing list. You can, however, take steps to minimize the amount of spam that you receive.
Here are my top 4:
Address Munging
Never ever post your email address online this is a sure fire way of being added to a spammers list. If it is a must that you need to give your email address to members of a forum be sure to disguise it so that a spammer’s bots cannot read it. Example instead of `joebloggs@joe.com` you should use `joeblogges[@]Joe[dot]com` Make sure that if you own a website you have a contact form instead of placing your email address on your website.
Get Alternative Email Addresses
If you are signing up to receive free downloads don’t use your primary email address get yourself a secondary one and use it purely for this purpose. Don’t give this email to people you want to be contacted by as it will just get lost amongst all the spam it will receive from these services. Log in every couple of days and delete all the junk this will prevent the account from being removed. Select an email at least 8 characters long and do not use your name. Spammer will often create mailing lists from people’s names i.e. joebloggs@hotmail.com and they quite often succeed.
Look out For Phisher Spam
Phishing is used to scam you into giving out your personal details. If you receive any emails with links for you to click on requesting you update your details i.e. bank account, credit cards, PayPal, eBay hit the delete button immediately as these sites will never include links in their emails.
Get a spam filter or spam blocker
Get yourself a spam filter. Most email providers will already provide you with one and although not 100% affective it will keep out the biggest majority of spam.
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