There are several precautionary steps you can take to reduce the amount of spam you may receive.
- Do not EVER click on the ‘unsubscribe’ link of spam. This only confirms that there is an actual person receiving the spam email and that address will typically be sold and the amount of spam you receive may dramatically increase. Do keep in mind that if you are receiving email that you did sign up for at one point and no longer wish to receive the unsubscribe link typically will not be used for this purpose, however we recommend using caution on this point.
- When using your email address on your website it may be best to ‘hide’ your email address by using ‘at’ rather than the ‘@’ symbol, or some other strategy such as javascript to hide your email address. Spammers often harvest email addresses from websites.
- If you use online services such as newsgroups do not post your email address or use your address in the reply field of your newsreader.
It is possible that a single harvest of your email address may be enough to get your email address on several spam lists.
In the event that your email address is receiving a lot of spam you can do one of the following to help reduce the amount you are currently receiving:
- Add filters to your mail. Many popular email clients now support filtering. You can set up rules to automatically delete email with undesired words or from specific addresses. Many of these programs also have some basic spam filtering built in to detect a wide variety of spam emails. The draw back of this option is that the filters aren’t updated frequently and it is tedious to add enough filtering to be effective.
- Use anti-virus software that also has spam filtering capabilities. This is fairly effective and low cost solution. The filters are also updated regularly.
- Subscribe to a third party spam filtering service such as our aggressive spam filtering service.
- If you are able to change the email address you are using that will give you a ‘fresh start’, however spammers will frequently use thousands of common names at the same domain name in an attempt to locate more ‘live’ email addresses.
Do keep in mind that opt-in mail is not junk mail. If you asked for it follow the unsubscribe instructions, however if it sounds a little 'fishy' you may want to give them a call.