You can’t really prevent spam from reaching you altogether; however, there are some things that you can do to minimize how much you receive.
Even if you’ve heard some of these tips before, it never hurts to review the checklist.
- Email addresses: First and foremost, you should not post your home or business email address on public forums, newsgroups, chat rooms or websites. Unless you really want to be inundated with a great deal of information that you don’t want or need, this should be the golden rule to follow when it comes to your online presence.
- Create a temporary email address: This is part 2 of the rule above: if you must supply an email address on a public forum, create a temporary or throw-away one for that purpose. You can then shut down or just stop using that address at any time.
- Use a spam filter: There are many tools and filters available to stop spam from reaching you. If your ISP offers these services, use them! But you should also run an anti-virus program on your own computer: the more protection you have in place, the better.
- Don’t reply: Before replying, reread the content and evaluate its legitimacy. Examine the senders address and check the headers-to see if the sender appears valid. But remember: banks, government agencies (especially Revenue agencies), courier services (UPS, FedEx) and other similar organizations never send emails that will ask you to enter or confirm personal information. If you receive such a message, delete it.
- Don’t click on any links in a spam email: Enough said – the only thing you should click on is the delete button.
- Never forward an email from someone you don’t know to a list of other people: The same advice goes for email chain letters. All those addresses that appear in the To: field are a gold mine for spammers.
- Think before you join: Before you decide to join an online list of any kind, you need to make sure that the owner of the list has no intention of selling your contact information to anyone else. Check to see if you are able to opt out of receiving unsolicited email from that website. A good way to know for sure is to read the websites privacy policy.
- Preview your messages: Most email programs allow you to preview all your messages before you actually open them. In Outlook, go to the View menu and select Preview Pane. Once that is turned on, whenever you want to preview a message, single click on it and you will see the preview.
- Set your privacy settings correctly: Make sure that your privacy settings don’t allow you to receive solicitation from websites. If and when you sign up for free email accounts, make sure to read and uncheck any preselected choices that you don’t want.
Conclusion
Although spam is a huge annoyance to everyone, it will not be going away soon in this era of technology. Because everyone will continue to stay connected and become even more entrenched in all things electronic for the foreseeable future, we need to find the most effective way to live with what we have. We all have to deal with spam in the most intelligent and effective way possible to make sure it doesn’t cause any real damage to our own computers, or anyone elses.
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