SPAM Reduction Tips
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
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, adding them to your address book should prevent the problem from continuing.
Don’t put your email address on your web site
Instead, have your web site designer set up a script that will send email only when the user clicks a link or a button - your email address will be inside the script, not on the web page, and that will help keep harvesting bots from getting it.
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 I receive email from someone that they got as part of a mass CC, and what they sent me 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 almost guaranteed to generate spam - you know someone will have a spambot virus on their computer! 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 if 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 sell 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 will tell you they share your information with ’affiliate members’. Unfortunately, this often means anyone they chose to sell their mailing lists to. And even if you later tell them not to contact you and they honor that, that doesn’t mean anybody else they’ve given your address to will.