The Can Spam Act is not working. Most spammers either don’t care, are not being tracked, there isn’t enough people to go after them, or they are in another country. Either way it don’t work. So here are some tips to help stop some of the spam in your Inbox.
First off, if you already have a email address that you use and it is being bombarded with spam. Sorry you should have read this first. You are going to need a filter, may I suggest V.Protect our filtering service. Now this will only work if you are the owner of your domain. If not you can setup your own email filtering solution using SpamAssassin.
Rules
1. Never ever use your real email address to sign up for anything. Do not trust the companies that say “We promise never to use or sell your address”. If you give them your email address they can and some of them will sell it. Use a throw away service such as
I use PookMail most of the time, and the way it works. Instead of giving them your real email address you go to the PookMail Website and create a fake one in the form on the front page. Then hit the go button. Pookmail will work for 24 hours. Then the address is gone, just long enough for you to sign up and get anything you need. If you really needed anything in the first place.
If you use Gmail for your email. You can use it in a special way, in that you can assign a name to the email address you are using. For instance if I was to sign up for Hot Nerd Mailing List. I could use mygmail+hotnerd@Gmail.com then anything sent to my Gmail from Hot Nerd would be to mygmail+hotnerd@Gmail.com. I can use the Gmail filter to then filter anything sent to mygmail+hotnerd@Gmail.com. Pretty kewl huh!
2. Never ever under any circumstance use a mailto: link on your website. There are scripts and codes out there to hide your email address. Such as The Encoder form by Automatic. You can also use the same as above in 1 if you use gmail by giving it a distinctive name.
Another option is to generate an graphic image with your email on it, there are places on the internet for that too. Try Liquism or the Free E-Mail Signature Generator. These will both generate an image that you can place on your website. Neither of these options are fool proof. What we are stopping here is the bots that are hunting the web to get an email address.
3. Do NOT reply to any email that is Spam. Alot of spammers will try to guess at user names. They will even start at a, aa, aaa, aaaa, etc… to find a valid user. They will send email to every name possible hoping one is a real person. How do they know you are real? When you reply back to them and ask them to stop. They don’t get that email and go, well they asked so I’m done. NO. They take it and they add it to their list. So if you get a spam email, delete it or feed it to your filter. Do not reply to it.
I will continue to add ways to avoid spam. This is a never ending battle. If you have a way that is not listed here let me know and I will add it.
