Are you a spam fight meister ?

Do you consider yourself as a person who’s smart enough to find out that which website is going to respect your privacy ? Do you fear while submitting your e-mail address on a website ? Do you know what steps should be taken before you submit your email address on a website ?

I’m sure by the time you’ve got an idea that this post is about e-mail privacy and how you can ensure that your inbox can stay spam free (not possible at all, still it’s always good if you don’t get bombarded with spam). Let’s see what can be done to ensure that we can be safe from spam and if at all we get caught in spam then what can be done to avoid it :

Prevention is better than cure …

We always hear these things that prevention is better than cure and I totally believe in it. Let’s see how we can be safe from spam and ensure that our time gets utilized in better things -

1. Check out the privacy policy : We all trust few websites and we should too, however there are very small areas where the websites may trick us. Lot of websites mention in their privacy policy that they may sell your email address to advertisers. So, it’s important to check privacy policy.

2. Use of temporary email address : There are various temporary email services which are now giving the option of creating temporary email address which expire after sometime. So, if you doubt a website or desperately need to use their service but their privacy policy says that they may provide the email to advertisers then you should consider using those temporary email services. 10 Minute mail is one such service which we’ve covered earlier.

3. Report spam if it’s spam : Most of the email services enhance their spam filters on the decisions made by people like you and me. If you’ll report that the email is a spam, it’ll help the email service’s spam filters become better and that in turn will help most of us.

4. Try not to display your email on websites : There are many spam bots which crawl the web and collect the email address which are displayed on a webpage. You should ensure that you must not list your email address in public on your website or any other website.

5. Maintain two or more email accounts : I’ve got two three email accounts and I’ve configured them all in my GMail account, I think and submit the email accounts accordingly. For personal contacts, I use a different email and for business , I’ve got a separate email. There is one special email which I use to fill up form, services over the web. Because of this if 1 of the email gets bad at least you will have the option of leaving that e-mail as one of the email is working fine for you.

Help me! The spam is killing my inbox!

Oh that’s kind of sad however still there is ray of hope for us. There are few solutions which may help us in being safe from the spam emails and here are some of them :

1. Use GMail : Well you may say that I don’t want to change the email service however, GMail apparently has finest spam filtering service. Hardly any spam message comes through my inbox. It allows you to show as if the email was sent from your original email address. Of course you may retrieve the emails in GMail with the help of POP/IMAP etc.

2. Manual filters : There is always a trend of spam messages and if you can figure that trend, then you can manually setup filters in your web based email service (if they give the option) if you use some email client, then most of them have the option of setting up the filters.

3. Use spam filtering software : There are various spam filtering software which can be easily configured with your choice of email client and that should solve most of your problems. Here’s a list of some of the best free spam filtering software, choose the one which suits you else ping us and we’ll suggest one for you.

4. Slowly start changing the email : Once an email account gets circulated amongst the spam bots then it’s very difficult to maintain things. Slowly inform your friends, business contacts about the change of email address. It may take time but that’s the best thing you’ll ever do to yourself.

Now, do you think that you are a spam fight meister ?

If yes then take this quiz from McAfee SiteAdvisor and find out if you can beat the spam at the first place itself or not ?