Getting rid of Spam E-mail

Getting as little spam e-mail as possible.

Avoiding Spam on your e-mail

Spam is the most obnoxious form of advertising, that most people are actively avoiding. Most internet providers have e-mail accounts that come with spam filters. The effectiveness of these filters varies. Unfortunately even the best spam filters are not enough, as many have found, as spammers are always developing new ways to circumvent the filters.

Not giving out your e-mail address

To not receive advertising over e-mail, it is best to not have spammers or more legitimate marketeers have your e-mail address. So, it's better not to give out your address when there is no need to.

Spammers use bots that automatically collect e-mail addresses from webpages. This is often referred to as e-mail harvesting. If you leave your address on forums or blogs, it is going to end up in their databases, and you will get spam.

Custom e-mail addresses

But what if you do need to leave your e-mail address on webpages or with companies who'll use it for their marketing purposes?

By using several e-mail addresses, you can separate people you trust with your address from those you don't. You could use one or more free addresses from a public service (GMail, Outlook, Yahoo, or other) to hand to companies or for use on websites. These services are usually ad supported, though, which in effect exposes you to more advertising, instead of less.

Your e-mail account from your ISP may also come with the ability to create e-mail aliases. This is an e-mail address of your choosing, that is just another name for your main address. You could create one or several aliases for different occasions.

You can also take the idea of e-mail aliases one step further, and register a domain name, that you use to create as many e-mail addresses as you want. You use a website of your own to have e-mail addresses of. Then, you can easily create a separate e-mail address for every organization you contact. If you get spam on a particular address, you know exactly from which route it came. You then have the choice of deleting that address, stopping the source of spam.