How to Prevent Spam

Learning how to prevent spam will allow you to see a less full email box with fewer possibilities of identity theft.

Where Spam Comes From

For many, the spam in their email boxes seems to come from nowhere. These pieces of spam seem to be simply annoyances from out of nowhere, but this isn’t quite the case. Spam is created by a computer program, using various algorithms to come up with a long list of email addresses. Then, the actual spam messages is created and sent to the various email addresses. Though this seems like indiscriminate emailing, and it is, this email sending process allows the message to be sent to as many people as possible.

If millions of people are sent the same message and only 10% respond, that’s still 100,000 people who might be giving up financial information, buying a bogus product, etc. The numbers are still in the favor of the spammers.

Preventing Spam from Coming to You

While many email services now offer a wide variety of spam filtering tools, this still does not stop the flow of spam in your life. Though you might not open up the spam in your email box, it is still finding its way to you, which is not what you want to happen. Instead, you need to take a different approach:

• Continue to use spam filters.
• Don’t post your email address anywhere online.
• Don’t respond to spam.
• Use a spam killer program.
• Don’t sign up for mailing lists without privacy rules.

Spam bots can grab email addresses from anywhere on the Web, so if you have your email address posted somewhere, you will find that you are getting more spam than you did beforehand.

The less access anyone has to your email address, the more likely you are to avoid spam. If you have to give out your email address, have a junk email address which you use for only financial transactions, mailing lists, etc. Keep your personal email addresses separate to keep spam out.