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copyright © 2005, by Karyn Greenstreet. All
rights reserved.
Spam. Those annoying, time-consuming emails that clog your
Inbox and ruin your day. You wonder: How did it ever get so bad? While
it’s not possible to completely eliminate spam, there are quite a few things
you CAN do about the problem to reduce your burden.
Spam is defined as an unsolicited email trying to get you to buy something.
In addition, it’s email that tries to get you to give up something: your
credit card number, social security number, login ID, etc., by pretending to
be a legitimate email. Here are ten tips for stopping the current spam
you’re getting, and avoiding getting on new spam lists.
1. Maintain two email addresses: a Personal Email
Address (that you give to family, friends and business associates), and a Safe Email Address (one you use whenever you’re ordering
something online, signing up for an email newsletter, or creating a profile
on a website). For instance, I use a Hotmail account for my Safe Email
Address. If a spammer were to get a hold of that address, fine. All the
spam will go into my Hotmail account, which I only look at once a week.
Hotmail has a great anti-spam filter built in, so it’s easy to see what’s
spam and what’s not. This practice leaves my personal email account
relatively spam-free (maybe I get two spam emails a day to my personal
account). Some free email services include Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail
(Google’s new email service).
2. Use your Safe Email Address to send emails to
companies who might be harvesting email addresses from incoming emails. For
example, say you want to write to a company to ask them about their
products. Some companies will harvest your email address from the email you
send to them, and put you on their mailing list. By using your Safe Email
Address, you can avoid seeing messages from these companies come to your
personal email address.
3. Stop giving your email address to everyone who wants
it. Does your local bank really need your email address? Does your
grocery store need it? Just because someone asks for it doesn’t mean you
have to give it to them. If it’s a non-local company, or you are signing up
for a mailing list, then they probably do need it. But it’s okay to leave
the email address blank when filling out forms. Always ask yourself, Do I
want to be contacted by this company via email? (Speaking of mailing lists,
make sure the companies you subscribe to have a public, posted Privacy
Statement on their website.)
4. Do not put your Personal Email Address on your
website. Instead, use a form so that your email address is hidden.
However, some spammers use special software that looks at the HTML code
hidden in the form to steal your email address, so using a form by itself
isn’t always the safest route. Better yet, use a free Form Processor so
that your email address is never even in the HTML coding on your pages. The
service I use is Bravenet’s Form processor (www.bravenet.com). You can see
ours in action here:
http://www.passionforbusiness.com/send-mail.htm
5. Never buy anything that’s sent through a spam email.
First, it just encourages them to continue to spam. Second, it tells them
that your email address is accurate, and they can then sell that address to
someone else.
6. Never reply to spam and ask to be unsubscribed.
They’ll just ignore it anyway, and it tells them that your email address is
accurate, which just keeps you on the list. Note: many legitimate emails
newsletters and mailing lists use automated unsubscribe links at the bottom
of their emails, and you CAN use these to get off of mailing lists.
7. Use anti-spam software, like Norton Internet
Security, on your own PC to filter spam as it comes into your email system.
You still receive the spam, but it gets filtered to a Junk Mail or Bulk Mail
folder, and segregates the spam from the legitimate email. Most anti-spam
filters need to be trained, however, so you’ll have to occasionally tell the
filter that something is NOT spam that it inadvertently put into the Junk
Mail folder. Many of these anti-spam filters work on the principle of White
Lists (legitimate email addresses that you DO want to receive email from)
and Black Lists (spammer email addresses that you do NOT want to receive
email from). Learn how to train your anti-spam software and it will work
wonders for you.
8. Check to see if your ISP or hosting company has
anti-spam technology in place, to catch spam before it even hits your
Inbox. Be careful, though, because sometimes these filters are over-zealous
and you have to train it to accept emails from mailing lists that you have
subscribed to.
9. Do not use a catch-all email address. A
catch-all email address is set up if you have your own website, and it is
intended to catch all of the incoming emails sent to your domain even if
there is no legitimate mailbox by that name. For example, your email
address might be
mary@mydomain.com. If that mailbox is set up as a catch
all, and someone sends an email to
marie@mydomain.com (with a spelling mistake in the email
name), it will be forwarded to
mary@mydomain.com. However, spammers know about
catch-all email addresses, and will take your domain name (mydomain.com) and
add common prefixes to it, like info@ or admin@. If you have a catch-all,
then those spamming emails will come to you, even if you don’t have a
legitimate mailbox of
info@mydomain.com or
admin@mydomain.com set up with your hosting company. See
how easy it is for spammers to get to you?
10. Finally, if spam is really bad, create a new
personal email address for yourself, tell everyone about the new address
(give them several reminders that you are changing email addresses), then
delete the old personal email address. This may seem a little drastic, but
if you receive 200 spam emails a day, it might be time to time this final
step to eradicate it.
You are not powerless against spam. But you do have to
take action to fight back. Don’t let them bully you into accepting hundreds
of unwanted emails a day! Take action now to reclaim your Inbox!
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Karyn Greenstreet is a Self Employment expert and small business coach. She
shares tips, techniques and strategies with self-employed people to boost
clarity and focus, create sustainable motivation, and increase sales and
profits.
Visit her website at
www.PassionForBusiness.com
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