5 Zero Cost Solutions to Spam

by: Niall Roche
Spam is a daily nuisance for all of us. It doesn't matter whether you're employed or unemployed. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO of a multinational or if you're a work at home parent - spam affects us all. There are dozens of porgams available for fighting spam. The major problem is that most of these programs cost money. What I'm going to do is show you 5 different ways of combating spam - all free. 1. Don't give out your personal email address. This is stating the obvious but it's the first big mistake people make. DO NOT use your personal email address for sign up forms, competitions, surveys or any other nonsense that may result in you being spammed. It's much easier to prevent spam, by never giving out your personal email address, than it is to cure the problem once you're on 100's of junk email lists. 2. Use a free email account Set yourself up with a Hotmail, Yahoo or any other free email account and use it as a spam holder account i.e. use it on all those popups or sign up forms that you *suspect* may try to spam you. You can then periodically check your free email account for both legitimate and spam email and delete the rubbish you don't want. This single step can save you countless spam related headaches. 3. Use a disposable email address You could also try a disposable e-mail address from www.spamgourmet.com. This is a brilliant idea. Once you've registered your forwarding email address (your personal email address) with them you can then create self-destructing email addresses that stop working after receiving a specific number of emails. 4. Use a free spam filter. Unfortunately even when you follow all the correct steps you can still wind up getting junk email. There's only solution at that point - install a spam filter on your PC. The best free spam filter I've come across so far is Mailwasher. An excellent program that won't cost you a penny. 5. Newsgroups and forums Spammers love newsgroups and forums. They especially love the way people post their personal email addresses there. It doesn't matter if it's a paid, private or free forum spammers have their harvester programs hunting for email addresses every minute of every day. If you have to post your email address then use the following format: username AT domain.com. If that doesn't make sense then what I mean is instead of posting as test@spam-site.com you'd post as test AT spam-site.com. Spammers can harvest 35,000 email addresses per hour from newsgroups and forums - don't let your email address become one of those. There you have 5 simple, free solutions to drastically reduce the amount of spam you receive every single day. If you want to learn more about fighting spam then drop by spam-site.com.