Spam Fighting Tips
- Be careful who you give your email address out to. Don't give your email address to companies who are known for conducting spam and never reply to or click on a link found in a spam, as that just tells them that your email
address is good and they will send you more. Don't give your email out to friends that like to participate in chain letters. If they expose your email address on a chain letter and one of the other recipients is a spammer, they could add your email address to their mailing list.
- Set your email reader to open email in "plain text" rather than "HTML". Many spammers send HTML encoded messages with IMG tags that link back to programs on their website that will notify them that you have received their email. If they know your email address is valid, they will only send you more spam.
- Remove your email address from your website's pages and provide a web based mail form instead. This way spammers can't send robots to your page to harvest email addresses and put them on their mailing lists. www.dansie.net can
provide you with such a script free of charge.
- If you don't have a website and you have just one POP email account, you may consider just closing your account and opening a new POP email account. Make sure that your ISP hasn't been the one selling your email address too!
- If you have your own domain name, don't set up a POP email account to catch ANYTHING@yourname.com. Many spams you receive will say, "TO: 83jfd9e3@YourName.com". The user name was merely made up. Set up your POP accounts to only receive email from specific user names and have the rest go into oblivion.
- Still getting spam? Install Dansie Anti Spam on your email server. It moves spam out of your pop email account and into a quarantine file so you don't have to download or read it. Powerfully accurate Bayesian style filters allow you to tell the program which emails are good and which are spam with merely a couple mouse clicks. The program simply "learns" from you as you sort your mail and after a while, it will sort your mail better than you can. Well, almost.
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