How To Stop Spam Email

Introduction

If you have an email account, you are bound to receive spam emails. It may be quite tough to effectively combat spam email as it costs nothing to send millions of email messages. There is no disincentive against email spammers. It is noticed that the offers to remove your name from a list are often not true. On the contrary your name most likely gets added to another list.

Step 1

How do you recognize spam email? If the name of the person in the email is unfamiliar, most probably it’s spam. Most spam are sent between midnight and 4 AM. So, look at the time. Almost all spam email will be 3 KB, so check the size of the fail. Most email spam will have a similar format – “Hey, I am so and so…” with a link or several links. Do not click the link even if you’re tempted to. Use spam blocking tools provided by your email provider.

Step 2

More than 90 percent spam email is caused by you publicly disclosing your email address. If providing contact information is necessary use alternative methods like image picture of your email address making it hard for spambots to harvest it. Spammers and spambots actively harvest emails out of public forums and chat rooms.

Step 3

However, the first step against spam email is to never ever reply to them. Spammers like to forge email and send it using innocent computers. It may be next to impossible for an average internet user to decipher who or where spam email came from, since the spammers are great at forging emails, and send it using innocent computers. While many internet providers will remove your name from the list if requested, there are many still who will sell your email to third parties. You can avail the services of SpamCop to make complaint. This is a free spam reporting service. At your personal level all you can do about spam email include never responding to it, filtering it out by marking it spam, and complaining to providers about it.

Step 4

There is anti-spam law 2003 in place but it’s reportedly weak enough to address the concerns. If you’re an American, you can join an all-volunteer Internet end-user advocacy organization Cauce (www.cauce.org) to promote anti-spamming efforts.

Step 5

Several U.S states have laws regulating spam. You may forward the fraudulent email spam offering products that don’t work or don’t exist to the U.S Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov. Spams that promote stocks can similarly be forwarded to US Securities and Exchange Commission at enforcement@sec.gov.

Tips

Use multiple addresses that are also disposable to identify sources of spam email. Have one main account and use the rest for friends, websites, entertainment sites, financial websites etc. Set all those addresses to forward your mail to the main account. You may trace spam email to one of the disposable alternatives which can eventually be deleted.

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