Get Rid Of The Spam And Gain Control Of Your Inbox
Beating the spammers at their own game may be easier than you may think. The idea behind this method lies in using three levels of defense to remove the unsolicited e-mail from your inbox. In order to put this plan in motion you can inexpensively purchase your own domain and web hosting service for less than $10 a month or you can subscribe to a free web-based e-mail service such as Hotmail or Gmail.
Your first level of defense is to use throw away e-mail addresses. The idea is to give everyone a different e-mail address. That way if someone starts spamming you just delete their e-mail address and immediately stop their spam. If you have your own web hosting account this is extremely easy to do. Each e-mail address you give out will be an alias and the e-mail received will forward to your main e-mail account. If you are using a free e-mail service, then you may have to share your disposable e-mail addresses. But you can still use this defense by limiting three to five companies to a single e-mail address.
The second level of defense is a server based e-mail filtering program. A Server based spam blocker is several times more powerful than any junk mail filter program that you may have installed on your personal computer. Most web hosts use the Spam Assassin anti-spam program and the commercial e-mail services like Yahoo and Google have their own versions of this type of program. These programs filter out the spam in two different ways. First they have access to various anti-spam groups that monitor e-mail addresses that are specifically set up to gather spam. These e-mail addresses are called honey pots. Once a new e-mail is received at one of these addresses, alerts are sent out to the whole network with instructions on how to identify and filter out the new spam mailing. As a second layer of defense, these programs also have sophisticated filters and can recognize e-mail headers that have been obfuscated by criminal spammers.
The final leg in our strategy is to be able to route your e-mail to the proper folder once it hits your inbox. First of all, any e-mail marked as spam by your e-mail filtering program will go directly to a junk mail folder. That junk mail folder should be set to delete its contents within 15 days. You should occasionally check the spam folder but remember never ever do business with the spammer no matter how good the offer looks. You’re going to find that some companies will send you more e-mail than you want to read even though you initially agreed to be on their list. I suggest you prioritize your mail and then put your high priority e-mail into a single folder and the lower priority e-mail into other appropriate folders. Since each e-mail source will have its own e-mail address it is easy to set up the routing rules in your e-mail program.
When you put this three-pronged plan in effect, you'll find that the amount of junk mail getting through to your inbox will be almost zero. It's very easy to do considering the small amount of time and money involved. Remember that you need all three levels of protection for this plan to work for you.
