Tips On How To Get Rid Of Spam Email

As I was perusing my gmail account, I looked down in the lower left hand corner to notice that I was using 97% of my 15 GIGAbytes of storage...yes...14.76gb was taken by old emails. Now, granted that was years of emails, but probably 95% of them, I couldn't care less about. Those emails represented the arch nemesis of all email accounts - that delightful, square can of meat byproduct - SPAM.

Now, a choice lay before me. Do I go back through years of emails and delete all these worthless emails in order to save my poor email account, or do I start anew? The answer was simple. After 20 minutes of deleting page after page of emails, and making a .3GB dent in my storage capacity, it was time to nuke my account that was beyond saving, and get a fresh start.  The question then became - how do I keep the spam out of my new email account? Google had tried it's best with it's spam filters, and failed.  I'd tried my own filters that autodeleted keywords like 'male enhancement' and 'male erectile dysfunction'...and those stopped about .02% of emails coming in. The time had come to build an iron clad, spam free email so when I received a message, I knew it was actually something I wanted to read.

Tips For Building An Ironclad, Spam-Free Email Account

Step One: Understanding Spam

How do spammers get your email account? Like a rat drawn to a piece of fresh gouda, spammers are drawn to your email. They have many tools in their arsenal...bots, web sites, hacked databases, and more. Post your email address on your craigslist ad? Bad move.  A spambot will eventually crawl your ad, and scrape your email address.  Just sign up for a 'free' piece of software? That 'free' piece of software just cost you your privacy, as that unscrupulous developer just sold your email address to a spam artist. Signing up to a forum about gardening? They'll need your email address, and pretty soon your inbox has spam sprouting all over the place. The point is, spammers can get your email address from almost anywhere, so be careful.

To prevent spam, the first step is to minimize your email address's footprint on the web - use your private email address as little as possible, only give it out to the most trusted sources, and never, ever post it publicly on the web.


Step Two: Misdirection

Step two to keep spam out of your primary email account is misdirection. So you want to learn about gardening, so you decide to join the gardening forums.  To open an account, you'll have to confirm your account by giving them a valid email address. You have two options:

Guerrilla Mail

Guerrilla mail is a very cool concept. It's an email address that exists for 60 minutes and then ceases to exist. It disapparates. Finito. Poof! Deleted! But - it's around just long enough for you to confirm your account on your gardening forums. Any spam that might have come to you from that website now goes to an email address that doesn't exist. All you need to do is just click "copy to clipboard", and use that as your email address when you signup. There's just one drawback. You can't forget your username or password, because you won't be able to reset either, so keep a simple spreadsheet of the forums/websites you create an account for with your username and password.

The Shadow Account

Another option is the email shadow account. The concept is simple - it's a dummy account you use whenever you signup for forums or website user accounts. For instance, I use spamgarbage@yahoo.com. It's a tad messier than the guerrilla mail method, but you can always login to your shadow account to retrieve lost passwords or user names - you'll just have to wade through an inbox full of canned imitation meat product.

Step Three: Spam Tools

The breath of this topic is simply too much for this article, but just because spam tools, filters, and other anti-spam tools don't stop all spam, it's no reason not to use them.  Anti-spam tools will still catch 90% of the spam that hits your inbox, so by all means, you'll want to use it. Besides the anti-spam measures taken by gmail, live, and yahoo, there's also 3rd party software available to stop spam dead in it's tracks. Here is a list of the top 11 spam filter programs: anti spam tools.