I would love to tell you that I have a silver bullet to stop your spam problem. Unfortunately, one does not exist. Yes, there are hardware and software solutions that are getting pretty good, but they come at a cost.

Unfortunately, there is no easy and cheap remedy; once on a spammers list, you’ll be fighting forever. They trade, trade or sell your list to other spammers and you can never get out. A change of address is the only safe way. A lot of anti-spam products will certainly help, but you’ll always have to check your spam folder to see if there’s a “false positive” in there that you want; and learn how to “whitelist” the friends, colleagues, and discussion lists you want.

Some email providers are more prone to spam than others. This is due to a technique known as “Directory Harvesting”. Gmail is especially prone to this and many people have found that they are getting spam simply for signing up, without having sent or received an email!

Spammers know about Gmail and its popularity. Directory harvesting is the process of sending email to all possible combinations of letters with the @domainname after it.

Once again, it is a matter of payment for spammers. They know it’s popular, so they can write a program to send email to just about any combination of common names with the @gmail suffix (I deliberately omit the .com), and they know that a high percentage will be real email addresses.

After they get to the common names, they will look for other combinations. So it might help if you create an email as j#smith@gmail instead of jsmith@gmail. Unfortunately, this could also confuse the people you want to share the email with and maybe even trigger your spam filter to label your email as spam.

Why do you ask? Because spammers often change their “from” address daily, again using random characters, to thwart their “blacklist” attempt! (Better antispam software will allow you to block an entire domain, but many block only individual addresses.)

If you have a new email address and want to stay clean, or at least want to prevent your problem from getting worse, I have some tips you can follow.

7 steps to prevent spam from finding you

1. Protect your email address. Don’t give it everywhere. Use free disposable addresses (msn, gmail, yahoo) whenever possible. Maybe a second email account specifically for online purchases or even free subscriptions. There are also sources of temporary email addresses valid for a few minutes or days.

• mailinator.com
• 10minutosemail.com
• maileater.com

These are just a sample, there are many more services of this type. Always use SiteAdvisor, a free service from McAfee, when looking for a service like this (or any other search). Go to “green” sites only. (See http://www.freecomputerconsultant.com/siteadvisor.html for details on SiteAdvisor.)

Give your real email only to trusted people or companies.

2. Beware of friends and family emailing large groups without using “BCC” or blind copying. Those emails are then forwarded over and over again, with YOUR email address there to be harvested from any of those computers that are infected. If you know someone has a problem, give them your gmail, yahoo, or msn address instead of the good one.

3. NEVER put your email address on the web in its normal format. Use some kind of camouflage, at a minimum “[email protected]” with a note to remove the abcxyz. Something. Be creative. This especially applies to newsgroups.

4. Be courteous with other people’s email addresses. Learn how to use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) and when forwarding emails, remove all superfluous information, especially email addresses. Then encourage them to do the same for you.

5. NEVER open an email that you know is spam. Many emails include “home phone” programming that lets the spammer know that yours was a valid address when it was opened. That adds to the risk of viruses, spyware, and even serious damage to your computer’s usability.

6. NEVER click “remove me from your list” on a spam email. Again, that won’t get you off the list, just confirm yours is a real address so they can send you more.

7. Protect your computer. Always use up-to-date antivirus software and regularly scan for other types of spyware/malware. Some malware programs are designed to scan your address book and other areas of your PC for email addresses to add to their owners’ spam list.

Software and hardware spam filters

These filters, which can be expensive if hardware based, can certainly significantly reduce spam. But no matter what you do, there’s always the chance that a filter will create a “false positive,” that is, mark a good email as spam.

What that means is that you won’t see that email unless you check for false positives in some kind of special folder or quarantine area.

For this reason, I absolutely do not recommend any email or spam filtering service that does not give you access to suspicious spam – no filter is perfect.

And last but not least, try not to get too attached to your email address, in case you need to do an “address change”. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s the only option.

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