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Home Page  Articles Take a bite out of SPAM
We all get it. Unsolicited Email seems to be a never-ending occurrence in our Inboxes. Statistics say that up to 40% of Emails are SPAM. That's about 12.4 Billion SPAM messages EVERY DAY. It may not be possible to eliminate all SPAM...but, there are ways to slow the SPAMmers down. Here's few tips to clean up your Inbox.
Outlook 2003+Ever since Microsoft Office released Office 2003, browsing Email has been vastly improved. You'll find most, if not all, of your SPAM ending up in the Junk E-Mail folder. This allows you to flush all the SPAM with a click of the mouse. Careful though, some senders who you don't want to flush could end up in the Junk folder so it helps to browse through it.
Luckily you can sort the messages by sender allowing you to quickly find the names you recognize and mark them as a SAFE SENDER then move messages back to the Inbox. Future Emails from the sender will go directly to your Inbox. A great feature is HTML Emails that end up in the Junk folder are not displayed in HTML format. This hides offensive images and also the links do not work. The latter prevents you from accidentally clicking a link that could load a virus on your computer.
You can pickup Office 2003 or 2007 or just Outlook 2003/2007 at your local computer store or online. On 3/7/2007, Outlook 2003 was ~$55 and Outlook 2007 was ~$110 online.
Use An Online ServiceThere are Email services that will only allow confirmed senders to get through. When someone first sends you an Email they will have to respond to a return Email asking them to confirm they are a human being. From then on their Email will go through to you without intervention. SpamArrest is probably the most popular and costs about $45/year.
For Email that comes from automated systems like Forums you can add the senders to a safe sender list on SpamArrest so they get through without human intervention.
Periodically Change Your Email AddressThis is less practical but effective. Once a SPAMmer gets your Email address they will never stop sending you Email. By changing your Email address you'll be a moving target making it very difficult to continue to send you SPAM. The challenge is what to do if you have online accounts (e.g. forums), print your Email on your marketing materials or have Email links on other friendly sites.
Online Accounts
Fixing this is a matter of just keeping a list of the sites you have accounts on that require an Email address and updating them after you change your Email address.
Printing on Business Cards / Flyers
If it was a limited run like handing out flyers at a Conference then changing your Email address 3-6 months afterwards is probably safe. I'll qualify that with we've received contacts 2 years after someone got one of our flyers so it's not foolproof.
If it's something more permanent like a business card then I recommend using your Contact form online instead of printing your Email address. It can also make marketing sense. Instead of just putting your Web site and Email address put an embedded command such as "To contact me visit my Web site." Make sure your Contact page is easy to find by having a link to it in your navigation and in your content.
Links
You can ask the Webmaster to update your Email link to instead link to your Web site and find the Contact page. If you don't remember what sites all the Email links are located on, you can check your Statistics pages. Look for the Referring Sites section and check the URLs.
I hope this article has given you some ideas to reduce the SPAM you're getting. I'm committed to eliminating SPAM completely. Until that day comes the tips above should help make your day more productive.
This article may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part
without the express written permission of Kawika Ohumukini. You can
contact Kawika at
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