Reducing Spam
Any email address will eventually receive spam. And the longer you have the same email address, the more spam you are likely to receive. However, you can reduce a lot of spam by following the guidelines below.
Enable SPAM filters at your ISP or hosting provider and in your email software
Most ISP’s and hosting providers provide some level of spam protection - if yours doesn’t, you might consider changing companies. Experiment with the settings and use ‘whitelist’ options to make sure emails you do want don’t get filtered out. Most email software also provides junk or spam mail filtering - again, experiment and see what’s getting marked as spam. If you want to receive email from someone who’s being filtered out, add them to your address book.
Use a contact form on your website
Don’t put your email address on your web site; use a contact form instead. Your contact form can prompt the user to enter certain information (such as their phone number), provide a list of default subjects for them to choose from which makes sorting incoming emails easier, and include a simple test to prevent use by spambots. Most contact forms are processed by the server, not the user's computer, so your email address is never sent to their browser. Contact forms can also include options to add file attachments and allow the user to cc themselves.
Use BCC instead of CC
Practice smart email protocol - use BCC instead of CC when sending email to a group of people, unless there’s some reason for them to have each other’s addresses. That way if one of the recipients has a virus on their computer that harvests email addresses, it won’t get the whole list. Remind others to do the same - I’m always amazed when someone sends me an email they were cc'd on and it has all the previous email addresses from a vast daisy-chain of CC’s, plus the addresses of the twenty new people they’ve decided to send it to. That kind of thing is guaranteed to generate spam from third parties, because someone will have a virus! If you absolutely MUST send that cute kitten photo to your entire email list, play nice and BCC everybody!
Use temporary email addresses with new vendors or newsgroups
Set up an address with a free provider like hotmail or yahoo and use it when you provide contact information to an online vendor you’re not sure about, then see what else comes to that address. If they don’t share your address and you want to continue receiving information from them, you can always change your contact information later.
Know what policies a site has regarding email addresses
Read (or at least skim through) privacy statements. Some places tell you they share your information with ’affiliate members’. Unfortunately, this could mean anyone they sell their mailing lists to. And even if you tell them not to contact you later and they honor that, that doesn’t mean anybody else they’ve given your address to will.
