10 Best Practices to Keep Email Spam Away

Posted by Riko Trihendrawan | May 2nd 2008

Say Enough to Email Spam

Who says email spam problems got cured? It’s getting worse, as we can see happening daily seeing to mailboxes of colleagues, friends or bosses? or your own mailbox, too?.

The same founding concluded in a survey in US from Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm reported below. The report found spam costing US businesses $712 per employee annualy in lost worker productivity. Despite aggressive spam filter technology, 66 percent of email messages reaching user inboxes are spam.

According to the survey of 849 email users conducted during March 2007, Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm found that two out of every three email messages received by today’s business users are spam. As a result, users are spending 16 seconds identifying and deleting each spam email, which translates into an annual cost of $70 billion to all US businesses.

Some other key findings in the report include:

• Looking at the total email traffic, it’s estimated that at least 90 percent of email reaching corporate servers is spam
• The average user receives 21 spam messages to their inbox each day
• The most common types of spam identified by respondents were adult oriented solicitations (86 percent), financial lending solicitations (80 percent), and retail offers (76 percent)
• Respondents are beyond frustration over their spam-laden mailbox problem. Almost 20 percent of respondents believe jail time is an appropriate punishment for serial spammers

With that being said, for sure we’d want no spam messages ever come to our emailbox whenever possible (maybe impossible) to cost us time, energy & trouble in filtering spams manually. The followings tips maybe helpful in your efforts dealing with email spam.

The Top 10 Best Practices to Keep Away Email Spam and How to Deal with Email Spam

1. Disguise your email address when writing on web freely accessible discussion forum or plain web page, e.g. miley at cyrus dot net, miley ATcyrus dOtnet, etc, so only real human can read it but not automatic spam bots which mostly looking for @ sign or can recognize pattern in email address. For putting email address on web pages safely, a sort of simple javascript usually used to conceal it. Human can read and click on it, but not spam bots
2. Use only your free email account like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, MSN, etc to subscribe to mailing list or newsletter or to register for a users discussion forum. The reason why can be found on tips #10 below.
3. Ignore spam. Delete spam. These are 2 basic rules which most of the time true in our effort to keep spam away.
   Ignore includes the following actions: not respond, no actions, no click links, not open attachment. Just ignore, like they’re not there.
   Acting the wrong way, then even more spams may be coming into your mailbox.
   In addition to ignore, you need to delete them to not accidentally harm your system. Delete spam or junk email messages without opening them, even in the preview pane, as sometimes even opening only for a glance can alert spammers or worse put an unprotected computer at risk, e.g. infected by spyware, worms or computer virus.
4. Turn on that “images block” feature in your email program. Images display if turned on can be an indication for spammers to able to identify your mailbox is actually active, that further encourage the spammers to send more.. spam. So turn it off by default until you recognize it is a legitimate email.
5. Don’t ask for “unsubscribe” nor reply to spam unless you’re certain the “spam” email contoleed by a legitimate reputable company. This includes not responding to such messages that offer an option to ‘Remove me from your list”. Simply put, don’t ask for ‘unsubscribe’, unless the marketing email (spam) is from a well known, reputable or trusted sender.
6. Don’t buy *anything* promoted through spam. Spammers can make their living (and a lucrative one, too) on people’s purchases of their spam offerings. Resist the temptation to buy products through spam, and help to put spammers out of business.
   Beside, spammers often swap or sell the email addresses of those who have bought from them, so buying something through spam may result in even more spam.
7. Don’t forward chain email messages. Not only you will lose control over who sees your email address, but you also may be furthering a hoax or aiding in the delivery of worm or virus. There are also reports that spammers start chain letters expressly to gather email addresses.
8. Use email software with good built-in (or 3rd party) spam filter installed.
   Being integrated built-in spam filter will simplify in filtering spam. Continuous update in spam database, anti-spam technics will ensure the spam filter to work with the latest best available methods.
9. Add all your legitimate contacts to your email program’s address book, or put them into your spam-filter’s ‘white list’. So in case your mailbox is ladened by spam, you can rule the spam filter to reject anyone not in your address book or your white list (always accept list)
10. Last action, if there’s no other choice, you can shut your spam-ladened email address temporarily or even permanently, that’s why it’s better be one of those free email account (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.). Don’t forget to let your acquaintances know in advance your new email address to keep in touch. The spammers will receive a bounce back email for every spam they sent notifying that your email address doesn’t exist and hence will sooner or later ‘unsubscribe’ your email address from their spam list.

Now you have solid tips on how to keep spam away from your email boxes. Practice them consistently, you’ll have almost no spam in your mailboxes.