Top 5 Tips to Reduce Spam or Junk Email.

1) Use a spam filter!

It sounds obvious but it is surprising how many people do not use spam filters to protect their inbox from spam and phishing email. Here at Just Host we offer all our customers an open source solution called Spam Assassin that requires no installation on your part and most importantly it won’t cost you an arm and a leg!

2) Keep your email address private.

Don’t publish your email address ANYWHERE on the web, if your email address is posted on a public guestbook, blog or forum your inbox could very soon be cluttered with junk email. Automated bots crawl the web collecting these addresses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

3) Create a spare email address.

Treat your spare email address as your public one, use it online in forums, chat rooms and when subscribing to mailing lists and promotions. Remember your spare email address is a temporary one, don’t be afraid to change it often. And remember, if you are already a Just Host customer you can create an unlimited number of email addresses so you can change your email address as often as you like.

4) Handle with care.

You should never respond to any email address that you believe to be spam, this just tells the spammers that you are there and that their email addresses are reaching your inbox! You should also consider turning read receipts off, these are often used to determine whether the emails are reaching a live inbox. Finally, NEVER use the unsubscribe link unless you actually remember signing up to receive mail from the sender originally. This again is just another way for spammers to determine which emails are reaching the sender.

5) Use disposable mail.

If you are forced to enter an email address somewhere on the web where the authenticity of the website is questionable, use a temporary email address! A service like 10minutemail.com will give you access to a working email address so that you do not have to risk using your personal address on a web site you do not trust. Once you have finished, simply exit the website and you can leave knowing you will never receive any unwanted mail as a result of it.

The fight against spam has been ongoing since the first recorded incident in 1978, this affected 393 individuals. More than 30 years later and spam is on a whole new level reaching billions of internet users worldwide. It may not be possible to completely eliminate spam but we can all do our bit to reduce the impact it has on our inbox. Just be vigilant online and treat your email address like your house number and zip code, you wouldn’t post that everywhere would you?

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