The 7 commandments of Spam avoidance

1. Do not give away your main or important email addresses to anyone that you are not absolutely sure will not intentionally pass them on to others or use them for spamming purposes. By main email addresses I mean the email addresses that you use for your business, keeping in touch with your friends and family etc.



2. Create a secondary email address that will be used in cases when you are asked for an email address but you do not absolutely trust the receiving party. You can use one of the many free email services out there for that (Hotmail, Yahoo Etc.). When the secondary email starts getting to much spam, just replace it or create another.



3. Use your email client software to define rules and filters that will automatically reject obvious spam. If you do not know what email client software you’re using you can run our tests and find out. Most email clients have built in mechanisms for filtering email. If you are using Microsoft Outlook 2003 go here to learn more. If you are using Outlook 2002 go here. For Outlook Express go here. If you are using web based email services like Hotmail or Yahoo they have built in filters that can be configured by the user.



4. When you do receive a spam message (and unfortunately you will). Never respond to that email or press any embedded links that explain to you how to unsubscribe or stop receiving any more email from them. This is a well known trick employed by spammers to discover if some one actually received and read their message. If you reply or asked to be removed you will probably cause the spammers to send you even more junk then before.



5. If you need to post your email address on a web page or a forum try to write it in a way that will only be readable by humans. The reason is that many of the email’s used by spammers are harvested automatically from web pages and forums where people left their emails unprotected. Example: if your email is JohnDoe@somewhere.com you can type your email as JohnDoe at somewhere dot com.
   
   An even better solution would be to create a little image file that has your signature in it. You can use Microsoft Paint or any other graphics program to do that. For example the email image below was created by a simple graphics program:



6. If possible avoid using common first names or words as your email addresses. The reason is that automatic tools used by spammers try to guess common email names automatically. Example: if your name is John Doe and you have an email address that looks like this: John@somewhere.com you should consider renaming your email address to something like John-Doe@somewhere.com



7. If every thing else fails consider using special anti spam tools, those tools employ state of the art spam fighting techniques.