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Spam OK,
so it's not THIS kid of spam, but one
of my pet peeves has always been the junk email that has
littered my
email inbox! One of my email accounts gets nearly 300 junk
messages PER DAY! This is a problem that will only get worse
over time, and is a veritable arms race with unscrupulous spammers on
one side, and ISP's, email programs and users on the other!Here are some of my home office ideas for defending against junk email.  Maintain
a primary email address, that you share with your friends and family.
Use one or more secondary email addresses for shopping
online, or for any online presence you have. You can get any
number of secondary email addresses for free from Google (gmail) or
Yahoo, and it's easy to set up forwarding from those addresses to your
primary email address.According to the 2004 CANSPAM anti junk email law, all junk emails should have unsubscribe links in the email body. If the email is from a reputable company, go ahead and unsubscribe. If it is from someone you never heard of before, beweare, it is probably another way to validate your email address. In this case I recommend sending it to some place like spamcop below. Don't
forward chain letters, jokes or pictures that come from unknown
sources. As soon as a picture element loads from within your
email software, it reports the email
address back to the source which can then be sold to or used by junk emailers!Make
sure your email address is not harvested! If you have a
website or contribute to a blog or anything else online, make sure your
primary email address stays off of any web page. Spammers use
bots that crawl web pages looking for valid email addresses to add to
their list. If you want your email address to appear on a web
page, make sure it is a secondary one! If
you've developed a web page, create a contact us page that allows your
user to contact you, but doesn't expose your email address to potential
junk emailers and bots that automatically collect email addresses.Check
with the provider of your email address or your ISP (Internet Service
Provider). They may provide blocking services to block
the junk email before it gets to your inbox but you have to be careful.
Sometimes they will block emails that you want to come
through, and you won't know they've blocked it! If you do set
this up, check with your ISP to see if they'll send you a summary of
blocked emails once per week, and you can look for senders to remove
from their list of blocked emails.  Report it! I
use a great FREE junk spam reporting service called spamcop.net
. Once you sign up, you can forward any unsolicited email to
them and they will contact the internet service provider of the company
or individual that sent out the junk email. In most cases
this will get them blacklisted and they will not be able to send more
email! This will greatly reduce your incoming junk mail.As you move to a paperless office, reducing junk mail and junk email to both your physical and electronic inboxes is so important to your home office organization! |