5 Top Tips to Avoid Spam

Use Multiple Email Addresses

You should have a least two types of email address and possibly three. They are

1. Primary email address- for use only by friends, family, colleagues.

2. Secondary email addresses- these are typically free email accounts like hotmail or Yahoo accounts that you use for filling out internet forms downloading software etc.

3. Disposable email accounts- are, as the name implies, those you can throw away at any time. They're used mainly in public postings, chat programs, and web forms. Disposable email accounts are not invalid addresses. Mail sent to them is forwarded to another email account (the real account)

Don't Reply or try to Unsubscribe from a Spammers List

You may receive an e-mail message which tells you to need to reply to unsubscribe from a list. Don't reply. If you reply the spammer now know that your mail address is active and you can expect to receive more not less spam.
The best way to avoid spam is to never respond, and eventually they will give up. This can take a while but it works. Don't forget to put them on your blacklist anyway.

Don't Use Your Primary Email Address to Sign Up for Anything

Your primary email address should only be given to friends, family and associates and should never be used when filling out any forms (even offline ones). For everyone else outside your friends family or colleagues you should use either a

•  Secondary email address or
•  Disposable email address

Spammers use automatic harvesting or extracting software (like email extractor lite ) to scan web sites for e-mail addresses and to extract email addresses from them.

 If you want people on a newsgroups or bulletin board to e-mail you then you could use an alternative email address and/or you could try mutilating your e-mail address.

To Mutilate or obfuscate your email address you simply insert additional text into the email address making it effectively invalid. The text you insert into the text will be removed by anyone wanting to reply to you but not by a program. Therefore you need to make it obvious to anyone who will reply to you exactly what they need to delete.

As an example if your real email address is zebra@zulu1.com you would enter zebra@deletethiszulu1.com.

If you are a webmaster then follow the link for find more information on how to hide email addresses on web pages .

Check those Checkboxes

When you sign up for something on the Web make sure that you check to see what check boxes are ticked and which ones are not. Also read the description carefully as sometimes the box needs to be checked to stop your email address from being used and sometimes it need to be unchecked.

 Avoid using your main email address, use one especially set for this either a disposable one or second email addresses.

Change your email address

If you are constantly getting too much spam to your present account and it doesn't look like it's going to go away then it may be better to get a new email address.