Why do we receive so much spam? Where or how did it all start? If you receive 100′s of spam emails a week then your email was probably picked up by a spam list. When your email appears on one of these lists, it can be sold over and over again so you will get spam on a number of different topics. People pay to get lists of possible customers for their products, so as long as they are paying the spam list collectors will continue to collect.
Tip 1
How do they get your email in the first place? Well, one way they get your email is when you sign up for something online and plug in your email on a form. They usually say they don’t sell or distribute your email but can you really expect a spammer to tell the truth? Be very cautious about where you give your information. The best thing to do for sign up forms is to use an alternate email address. Let’s say your main email is bob@yourbusiness.com, you would use this for your bank, your friends and family, and websites that you trust but you shouldn’t use it when signing up for a social network or when applying for a loan, for instance. The smart thing to do is sign up for a Google, Yahoo or Hotmail account and use this email as your junk mail account, that way all junk or spam will go here instead of your main email. It’s a real pain when you set up your phone to receive emails from your main account and you have to sift through 50 junk emails a day. Avoid that. Set up a secondary email account today.
Tip 2
Another way the spammers can get a hold of your email address is when you have your email displayed on a website. Spammers have web crawlers that go out and search the net for email addresses and the crawler pulls these emails in and establishes lists. If you have a website or your company does, they usually have a staff section of the website with email addresses displayed for the crawlers to grab. To avoid this issue, your webmaster should have a link for each staff member pointing to a form to fill out on another page and that form gets sent to your email address. This way, they don’t get the opportunity to grab up your email addresses.
Tip 3
The third way the spammers can get a hold of your email address and add it to a spam list is from emails. Have you ever received a joke or political email that was forwarded to you and asked you to forward it to 10 others? Ah, yes! This is a spammers dream! These emails can generate 100′s or 1000′s of email addresses and will eventually fall into the hands of someone that knows how to extract these emails and sell the list. There is hope though. If you must pass along a great joke or a funny video, then clean up the email. Delete out all of the forwarding emails in the body of the email so that it is just the actual joke instead of 100′s of forward messages in the body of the email. It will actually be much cleaner and easier to read.
Bonus Tips
One thing I like to do when sending an email to multiple recipients is to put my junk mail email in the To: spot and then put all the recipients in the Bcc: spot which sends them the email anonymously so that the others don’t know that they got the email. This isn’t being sneaky, its just a way to avoid exposing your friends, co-workers and family to a spam list. Now, if you send a joke to 50 people, they may send it on to someone else but now if your email is collected, it’s just your junk mail and your list of 50 people is safe.
Avoid getting on a spam list. Watch what you sign up for online and use a secondary email addresses. If you have a website, don’t put your email on the site, use forms instead. If you belong to social networks and it’s open to the public to see your information, then use a secondary email instead of your main. Clean up forwarded emails before passing them along. They are messy emails and hard to read so its a good thing to do and use the Bcc: feature to prevent spammers from getting email address of your friends and family,