Eight Anti-Spam Tips

The best ways to prevent spam aren’t necessarily software and ISP spam filters. Our own habits and email practices can reduce spam without costing a dime. Here’s some of the things I do to keep spam away.

1. Have a disposable email address that you can use for websites and other registrations.

Setup a mailbox at GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo or any other free mail services. Use this on any web forms for things like software downloads or temporary registrations. The key is to only use it when you won’t care about email sent more than a couple days later. Check the mailbox occassionally but when spam becomes a problem just delete the account and create a new one.

If you ISP allows you to create email aliases you can create and alias to be used as the disposable address. Both .Mac and Yahoo mail allow alias creation which can serve as disposable addresses. You can create a rule to just put any email sent to that address into a folder of its own.

Here on the Spam Chronicles I display counts of spam ent to my Gmail account. This is the disposable account that I use. I found GMail good for the type of spam I’m receiving and very little gets through.

2. Don’t respond to spam

Don’t respond to spam. Not even to unsubscribe. That just tells them the email address is valid.

3. Obscure your address if you need to post it on a website or forum.

If you must post an email address on a website or forum make it so a human could understand it but not so a spam robot would find it. For example, myemail@spam[deletethis]chronicles.com.

If you register for a forum or website make sure they won’t display your email address. There may be an option to do so, make sure it’s off.

If you have your own website and want to post a contact email address you can create an image with the email address in it. For the Spam Chronicles, I use a WordPress plugin that obscures the address to robots. Even so, I follow rule #1 so if it does start getting spammed I can just replace it.

4. Use complex email addresses.

If you can pick your own email address put some complexity into it. People who use it all the time will pick it from an address book or other list so they won’t need to type it. It’s common practice to add and ‘dot’ between the first and last name so you probably want to avoid doing the same thing. But adding a dot or other non-alpha character someplace would help. Mixing in some numbers would help, although adding numbers at the end is a little too common. An example might be john-2smith@spamchronicles.com. This will help against spammers who just blast out a series of email names to the big ISPs.

5. Don’t forward chain email such as news stories, “calls to action”, funny jokes or urban legands. This spreads your email address, along with all the others in the chain, to people and places where you have no control. If you must forward it then cut and paste the joke into a new email, use your disposable email address to send it, and BCC (blind carbon-copy) all the recipients so that not addresses get forwarded.

6. Tell friends and family to follow rule #5 for your address. If you can’t rust them to comply, or just want to avoid the headache, then create another displosable address (like in tip #1) and use it for them and others like them. Keep track of the few you give it and change it when spam becomes a problem. Also tell them not to use your address at greeting card and other sites on the web.

7. Use an email client like Thunderbird that blocks images. Images can be used by spammers to see who gets their emails. Most web based email will also block images.

8. Don’t buy anything from spam and don’t click on any links in spam, not even to unsubscribe.Don’t open attachments. If you want to go to a link in any email either type the address into your browser manually. What you see in the email may not be where you go when it’s clicked. In some email clients you can hold the mouse over the url in the email and the real/target url will be displayed in the bottom status bar.

Bonus Tips

B1. If your ISP allows you to use aliases or add-on mailboxes then create at least one and use it. Never use the root email address provided by your ISP. Usually the initial addess provided by your ISP can’t be changed. If it starts getting spam there’s not much you can do. If you’ve used an alias or add on mailbox you can change the address, although it may still be a painful process.

B2. Simiar to B1, the address your ISP gave you by default may be easy to guess and you may not be able to change it. If this is s, create an add-on mailbox and us it.

When I had Comcast as my ISP they created a default, non-changeable address based on my name. I never used it, ever, anywhere. By the time I left Comcast it was getting over a thousand spam emails every month. Luckily I used one of the five available add-on mailboxes for my primary email and followed the rules listed above. It got spam, but not nearly the level of the default account.

B3. Use a secret email address that you only give to close friends or business partners who can also be trusted to practivce “safe email”. Use a mail service that either doesn’t have a spam filter or has one you can turn off.

B4. Consider using AOL My eAddress for email addresses for your family, freinds or club. You can pick your own domain so you won’t be on a popular domain where spammers blast out spam to millions of email address guesses. AOL says they’ll also make websites available at these domains sometime in the future. But if you want to remain spam free don’t but up a website at the domain. Spammers may catch the domain in a search engine and start blasting spam to addresses it’s trying to guess.

Do you have any tips of your own? Do you like or dislike these tips? Feel free to comment.