Are you getting flooded with SPAM? Aren’t we all. Unfortunately, there is no foolproof way to stop ALL spam from getting into your inbox, but there are several tips to stop spammers from getting your e-mail address.

Firstly, if you’re e-mail address has been targeted, and you’re being flooded with e-mails, the simplest thing to do is to start over with a new e-mail address. It’s pretty much impossible to get your e-mail off the spam lists once it’s found it’s way there.

So, you set up a new e-mail account, and here’s a few tips to keep it your PRIVATE e-mail account that isn’t a target of spam.

1) Don’t post your ‘private’ e-mail address on Newsgroup or Bulletin Boards. Newsgroups and some e-mail lists are a target for spammers to retrieve e-mail addresses. While most E-mail lists are protected from spammers, many are not. Be sure to read the fine print whenever you sign up for an E-mail list. Newsgroups and Bulletin Boards are little different in that they require you to use an E-mail address in order to post. Spammers scan those areas and collect e-mail addresses, and add them to their list.

2) Don’t post your ‘private’ e-mail address on websites. Any E-mail address listed on a website is a prime target of the spammer. This goes for things like Guestbooks, Bulletin Boards, Directory Listings, Member lists, etc.

3) Do NOT reply to Spam. Even if the E-mail says "to be removed from this list, click here"... do not under any circumstances do it! All this does is verify to the spammer that your E-mail address is valid and that you opened and read his E-mail. If anything this will only move you up higher on their priority list.

4) Set up temporary e-mail addresses, via Hotmail or Yahoo or your own e-mail servers, that forward the mail to your ‘real’ mailbox. Then, when and if your ‘public’ e-mail address becomes a target for enough spam that you’re fed up. Shut that e-mail address off, and create a new one, and re-forward your e-mail to the new account.

There are a couple other ways spammers retrieve e-mail addresses via harvesting robots that scan the HTML in your own web pages for imbedded e-mail addresses. Clienttech has a couple of strategies that we use to prevent those e-mail addresses from being read. So even if you have an e-mail form, or a Contact Us page for your prospective customers, we can encrypt your e-mail address to prevent the harvesting robots from reading it. For more information on how we do that, feel free to contact us.