What to do with all this spam!?
Email is a big part of our everyday lives and over the years, your inbox gets more and more junk-mail until you get to a point where you ask yourself if you REALLY need your email account or just give up and completely change your email address. Well, like a phone number, you can change it and you can block and block, but telemarketers and other unwanted callers are still going to call no matter what you do and if you change your number, a new bunch of people will just find it and the harassment begins again.
This does sound disconcerting, but then someone came along and said, ‘hey, lets build a spam filter’ and the way this work is that it searches for keywords within the body of the email itself and re-categorized it as good or bad mail. This worked for the beginning, but spammers get better and better and its been know for junk-mail senders to build filters themselves and program it such that only their email will pass through and block all other junk mail. Pretty ingenious, isn’t it?
Prevent spam before it starts. Many spammers these days have email generation software that will create emails to ANY domain that are common such as bob@, sales@, info@, office@, chuck@, sally@domain.com etc. First of all, an email should be pretty easy to remember, but at the same time, to prevent random mailings, try changing the format slightly, like first initial, then last name or the other way around. Already you probably reduced your lifetime spam by 10%, at least!
Divide up your emails from personal and business. 95 % of the time when you sign up for some product, service etc it will be resold. Look at the fine print. Most reserve the right to change their policies at any time, so even though they say they won’t give/sell your email OR other information to another party, they probably will do. Have a third email that you use for random things like this, your personal fro friend, family and people you trust and your professional one for business only. This will greatly reduce you incoming spam, however, it is unfortunate that you have to go this route.
Where do you usually check your mail? Is the mail server controlled by your ISP, company you work for or your web host? Your ISP and Web host might be using the same web filter, so either make sure they have it on or turn it off if you use your own as there are many PC-side email spam software that can do the same job. It’s not a good idea to run 2 at the same time as it causes delay in email and also wrong filtering that might divert actual email you want to receive.
Cut out the extra minutes in your day by looking for a web host that utilizes actual spam filtering software than trying to handle it yourself or utilizing a free filter, which never does a good job and sometimes makes the situation even worse. If your web hosting company offers ‘enterprise’ spam filtering, you know they invested real money into preventing spam from coming into your inbox. The other hosts really don’t care and leave the filtering to you or uses a free software like spam assassin.
Taking some of the suggestions that have been written out in this article will improve your email experience, add more time to your schedule and give you peace of mind that at least some of your online experience will become more productive.