4/14/2008 Taming Spam

Hello Everyone,

Today’s tip is about spam. I think everyone is familiar with what spam is, but where does it come from and how do we prevent it?

The 2 biggest ways spammers get your e-mail are:

They obtain domains surfing the net (or perhaps have programs that do the surfing) and then have programs that try different e-mail combinations at a fast rate. Bottom line is if your address is easy to guess (i.e. john@aol.com), then you are probably going to get a lot of spam.

You gave it to them!! Almost everything one the net requires you give them your e-mail address. Why? Because that is how leads are developed and how you develop a warm market on the Internet. Spammers either trick you through ads to give them your information or they buy your information from disreputable people in the net.

So what can you do to protect yourself from spam? Well, there are a few tricks that can minimize your exposure, but you are probably always going to get some spam. So helpful things to do are:

Make sure your e-mail provider provides a spam filter.

When you develop an e-mail address, use something hard to guess with numbers and special characters. Personally, I don’t like this approach because I want you to remember my address.

Get another free e-mail address to use as a “decoy”. Use that one when signing up for anything on the Internet. Or, if your current e-mail is getting a lot of spam, you might want to consider just giving the new address to friends and family and letting your old e-mail be the decoy. I recommend gmail at www.gmail.com as an alternate e-mail because the filter works great and you get lots of storage.

Never give out your e-mail address that you are going to use with friends and family on the Internet.

Periodically look at your decoy e-mail because you might get something legitimate from someone like me!!

Thanks for reading this tip. Feel free to comment and pass it around.

Until next week,
Mike