How to stop spam
Most people who uses the Internet regularly will most probably have a spam problem.
I use the Internet 12 hours per day 5 days of the week. My spam filter blocks about 600 spam messages each day. Before I discovered this simple SPAM KILLER technique I had to filter through those myself each day. This took up many hours of my day.
But then I discovered the cure for spam.
Before I tell you what I did to get rid of spam, let’s first look where spam comes from.
There are various ways for spammers to get your email address.
Web sites – Most web site require you to either register with them or to give them your contact details before they give you information. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the concept. The only problem is that some of these web site owners sell their souls email database just to make a couple of bucks. Most web site will not do this. I also collect people’s details on my web site but why should I sell my list to the competition. If a web site looks diceyor suspect, do not enter your details
Spiders – If you have your own web site or you entered your email address on a web site which displays your email address you will get a lot of spam. What the spammers do is they have a little program which scans the internet and collect everything that looks like an email address. This is easy since an email address is always text@moretext.com. In the web site’s html it reads mailto:text@moretext.com . At first they collected everything with an html tag of mailto: . Then we web developers got clever and added the email address to web sites without placing a link to it but they even figured that one out. What does work some times is to put your email in this format text (at)moretext.com . Also if you have your own web site prevent using general email addresses like webmaster@, admin@ or info@, those are soft targets.
email tracking – I am sure you received one of those silly emails saying that if you do not forward this email to 10 people in 10 minutes you will have grow-in toe nails. Apparently many of those emails contains a tracking code which sends the email addresses your forward it to, to the spammers’ server. So if you send it to ten, who send it to ten, who send it to ten you just rewarded the spammer with 1,000 fresh email addresses. DON’T Forward those emails.
Viruses - Viruses has been there for many years and will remain with us. Most viruses do not pose any threat for you or your PC. But what they do is sit on your computer and harvest all the email addresses you use. They then send that info to their server. The virus also spread itself by attaching itself to emails you send out. I once had a virus on my PC which used my internet connection to send out spam. I realized this when I saw that my 3G connection was transferring data even though my browser and email program were not open. Do regular scans and rather use Mozilla’s browser and email program than Microsoft products. The FireFox browser and Thunderbird browser is saver to use. Thunderbird also has a very effective spam filter, but if you pay for the bandwidth you use (3G or ADSL) then you do not want to download it to your PC in the first place.
The Solution
The solution to my spam problem was very easy.
Just open a gmail account. Yes, that is how easy it is to get rid of spam. Go to http://www.gmail.com and open a gmail account.
There not many nice names available anymore but opening a gmail account is free and if you receive a lot of spam it can be the best thing you have ever done.
On my daily routine I now delete only about 5 spams per day that slipped pass the gmail spam filter. In the beginning I went to check the spam box frequently to see if there are any ligitemate emails it deleted by accident, but there are hardly any.
The gmail online interface is not one of the most user friendly interfaces I have ever seen. But luckily you can also download the emails using your normal email software via a POP server. The gmail tutorials show you exactly how to do it.
I surely hope above article will help you to regain control over your inbox.
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