Defend Against Spam - Email Tips and Suggestions

A good portion, if not the majority of email traffic on the internet today is spam related. The subject matter of spam emails can include discounted Viagra, inexpensive Rolex watches, a surprise inheritance and any other type of scam imaginable. If your email address is more than a few years old or even only a few months, it is inevitable the spam will find its way into your in-box. You are not without hope though. The following tips and suggestions can help alleviate the influx of spam email messages.

For personal use email, create an address that is not easily guessed by random email generators. Use a non-alpha character such as a period or an underscore. Don not post your email address on publicly accessible web pages where they then can be picked up by email scraping software. If you are signed up with one of the many free email providers, be sure to enable any provided spam filtering services. If you download your emails to an email client on your computer like Outlook or Outlook Express, consider installing spam filtering software that integrates with Outlook and other email clients.

In a business environment, email services are often hosted in house or outsourced. An organization or business may also want to standardize their email address format in a way that makes it harder for spammers to guess or discover legitimate email addresses. Another good option for organizations that have a high volume of inbound emails is to enlist with an external to the organization spam filtering gateway service. This type of service receives all inbound emails and filters it before passing it on, majority spam free, to the final destination. An alternative to an external gateway spam filtering service would be to install spam filtering capabilities internally.

Lastly, make sure to implement safe computing practices on home or work computers. Ensure that anti-spyware or antivirus software is always installed and up to date. Encourage friends and colleagues to do the same to help prevent your email address from being harvested from a contact or address list on their computers via a backdoor Trojan or virus.