Top Antispam Tips:
- Guard your in-box: Don't give your your main e-mail address to anyone but the people you really trust and expect to be corresponding with. By people you trust, usually meaning, people who know for sure won't send you spam, chainletters, but you on mailing lists, etc.
- Use free web mail accounts: Have a side Hotmail or Yahoo free account that you don't mind if a little bit of spam gets through.
- Use a disposable e-mail address: This has helped me alot. The use of the wonderfull disposable e-mail addresses. You give them out instead of your real e-mail addresses; I'll touch on this more later.
- Use fake addresses: Ask yourself, does the site Require my real e-mail address? If you can get away with it, just enter some bogus e-mail address like [email protected]. If they do require some kind of verification, use a disposible e-mail address.
- Don't post your address: Spammers go on all sorts of forums, chatrooms, member directors, homepages, any were they can get a potential e-mail address. If you must post your e-mail, use a disposible one that fowards to your free web based account. Again...keep your main one a secret for everyone!
- Don't answer spam. Ever!: How many of you have done this... and did it work? No. The remove me from mailing list link is usually fake, it just comfirms that your address is real and that you read the e-mail. It also says your stupid and you don't know much about spam, your prob new to the internet, and therefore a good target. And don't send them hate mail back, it's just a bot program that dosn't have feelings and won't care what you say to it. It's like talking to a toaster.
- Opt out: Scan the whole web page document, look for little checkboxes to opt out of all the subscriptions. Often times they try to hide them, and use confusing wording. Read it carefully.
- Read the privacy policy: I know, who likes to read this... to make it easier, scan the policy 123, and I do mean scan it, don't really read it. Then go back and read the policy, try not to say words like and, is, of or other common words to yourself. Just get the main things. After a while, your reading will improve and you'll also be more informed of what your getting into.
- Use a spam filtering software This is so important, stop spam with spam filtering programs like SpamAssasin or McAfee SpamKiller 4.0. Make sure you read reviews on your choise of spam filtering, some only act as a plug in for Outlook were others (like SpamKiller 4.0) work with almost any e-mail client as well as hotmail and I *think* it works with yahoo too, not sure on that though.
The Use of Disposable E-Mail Addresses:
Thats right, now you can have an e-mail that will self destruct. SpamGourmet.com is what I use, it's free and you just get a simple account, make sure to pick a really short screen name, I say try and keep it under 4 numbers/letters. You don't have to keep comming back to the site either.
This is how it works. Sign up, you pick the screen name, let's say 1A3. You fill out the form, they need a a e-mail address... and what have we learned, never give out your real one (even though this place is safe), give out your free hotmail e-mail address. Confirm the e-mail address is real, then login. Now after that, you can change were you want your e-mail addresses to be forwarded to if you so choose. From there, you only need to go back if you want to refill an e-mail that is about to self-detruct.
You don't even need to be at the site to creat one, you simple fill out a form or e-mail to yourself to double check that it works... the dummy address looks like [email protected]. anyword, is used for a reminder, say for Zeropaid's forum, you creat an dummy address like [email protected] (see how you could identify it real easily). The number 20 can be any letter or a number up to 20. Thats the number of how many e-mails can be sent to that dummy address before it self-detructs. You can refill the number by going back to the site or just creat a new one. After the chosen number, 20 is the max, the next part is your user name. See how a good short one is ideal. It can be as long as you want though. It will just be a pain to give out. I highly suggest this, and you can delete an e-mail address prematurely. SpamGourmet.com has a few options, it's worth a check out. Good defense againt spam and maintaining your privacy.
http://spamgourmet.com
If you have any other tips... post them. I think I covered mostly everything. The original idea for posting tips and getting much of the information was from PCMagazine's colume of AntiSpam tips. I added alot comentary of my own, and added my own opinions of things.
Hope this helps,
- ClearYourMind B)
