June 17, 2013

Are you fed up of your inbox being loaded with unwanted junk emails? Do you miss the good old days when emails were exclusive, and receiving an email actually meant that there was something worth reading in your inbox? The following simple tips tell you how you can manage your emails, ensuring that spam stays out of the way.

  • The single most effective way to get rid of spam is to avoid giving your email address to unknown sources. This might be difficult, with most websites requiring users to provide a valid email address to move forward, and some even going to the extent of offering free merchandise or discounts in exchange for your email address. An easy way to cope with this is to have an alternate email id exclusively reserved for such purposes, and a separate one for friends and family.
  • You can also make use of your email application’s filter service to send emails from a specific source directly into your spam folder.
  • Avoiding an easy-to-guess email address is another effective way to stay safe from spammers. In most cases, these spammers do not go through the trouble of finding real email addresses from the net, but simply make guesses of obvious names, like say, michael92@xyz123.com.
  • Using the options of “unsubscribing” or being “removed from this list” should be exercised with caution. While it may seem like the easy way out, it could work against you in some cases. This is because requesting to unsubscribe tells the spammer that there is a real person at the other end, and that this is a valid email address. This could make you their target when they sell their lists to other spammers.
  • If you are willing to put some extra effort into curbing these spammers, you could report them to their ISP. The first step to doing this is determining the origin of the spam. You can easily do this by displaying the entire information in the email’s header. Working from top to bottom on the “received” lines could help you identify the spam’s origin. Most ISPs will block spammers from their service upon receiving the complaint.