As you’ve probably learned from firsthand experience, once you’re on a spammer’s list, it’s next to impossible to get off. And changing your email address can be a major (and costly) inconvenience, especially since you depend on it to stay connected with important business and personal contacts. We feel your pain, so to help reduce your chances of being spammed, here are five quick and easy preventative measures that will give you greater control over what goes in and what stays out of your in-box.
If you buy products online or subscribe to certain websites, chances are you’re going to get spammed. One of the most effective ways to prevent your email address from ending up on someone’s broadcast list is to set up a free Internet email address with Hotmail or Gmail to use for online purchases and subscriptions. You can use as many of these free email addresses as you want. And since they have nothing to do with your company domain, even employees with no administrative rights can use them. You can also use a throwaway email address when making purchases or subscribing to newsletters (see #4 below).
Whenever you subscribe to a website or buy something online, watch out for those small, pre-checked boxes that read: “Yes! I want to receive offers from third party companies.” If you do not un-check such boxes, your email address can (and will) be sold to online advertisers. To prevent this from happening, simply take a closer look at every online form you fill out.
Spammers have special programs that can glean email addresses from websites without your permission. If you are posting to a web forum or newsgroup, use your disposable email address instead of your primary address. If you want to post an email address on your home page, use “info@” and have all replies forwarded to a subsidiary folder in your in-box that won’t interfere with your main address.
If you own a web domain, all mail going to an address at your domain is probably set up to come directly to you by default. For example, an email addressed to anything@yourdomain.com will be delivered to your in-box. In order to fight spam without missing out on important emails that you do want to get, the next time you sign up for a newsletter, use the title of the website in your email address. For example, if the website is titled “successsecrets.com,” enter "successsecrets@yourdomain.com" as your email address. If you get spammed, check the address the spam was sent to. If successsecrets@yourdomain.com shows up as the original recipient, that identifies it as the source, since that email address was unique to that website. Now you can easily stop the spam by making any email sent to that address bounce back to the sender.
Opening, replying to, or even clicking a bogus opt-out link in an obvious spam email signals that your email address is active, and guarantees that more spam will follow. The only time it’s safe to click on an opt-out link or reply to an email is when the message was sent from a reputable company that you know or do business with.
Contact Benchmark Information Technology today for more information on how we can help you protect your network from spam, spyware and pop-ups. Call us toll-free at 866-275-0884 (option 1), or email us at info@benchinfotech.com for a free network evaluation and analysis.