Cutting Down on Spam E-mail

If there is one thing that just infuriates anyone about using e-mail, it’s Spam. Many people spend good money on “Spam Filters” that do filter out Spam e-mail but also filter out the e-mails that they want to receive.

The question I get asked by almost everyone I talk to is “How do I stop getting all this Spam?” That is definitely not an easy question to answer, however I do have a method that I have tested and it works. I tested this method over the course of 3 years with a MSN Hotmail Account, though it does not completely stop all Spam from reaching my primary e-mail account, It was able to cut down the Spam I received from between 50 – 80 e-mails a day to 6 – 10 and as a plus it’s completely free

To begin with, one must understand how you go from entering your e-mail address into a form on a web site to receiving sometimes as many as five hundred Spam e-mails a day. Many companies have partnerships with other companies who have partnerships with other companies and so on and so on. Hidden in the fine print whenever you choose to receive e-mail from most companies is a section where you agree to also receive e-mails from their “partners”.

The more sites you give your e-mail address to, the more Spam you will receive from both them and their partners. Another common occurrence is that your e-mail address will be added to an “e-mail list” and sold to the highest bidder and sold many times. Not all web sites will do this, the ones that don’t will usually state that fact on their web site. If you do a little extra reading into many web sites’ “Terms of Use” section you will be able to find out if they sell or exchange your personal information.

Start off by signing up for a free e-mail account, most major search engines offer free e-mail accounts (Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc.). You will use this e-mail account as the “junk account”. Anytime you are required to enter an e-mail address to say, read an article or download a picture, you use this “junk” e-mail address. That way any Spam e-mail from that website or it’s partners will be sent to the “junk” account.

You can read the e-mail in the “junk” account if you would like, I personally make sure I login to my “junk” account once a month to ensure that the service is not suspended for inactivity and I delete everything that has collected in the account over that time period. This allows me to use my primary e-mail address for those important e-mails that I must receive without having to sort through and delete lots of Spam or potentially miss an important e-mail because a my “Spam Filter” filtered it out. Any Spam that you still receive you should flag as spam in your e-mail client or web site to try to eliminate all of it.

Good luck!