Tired of receiving
spam emails![]()
in your Inbox? Wasted too much time identifying and trying to blockspam emails? Don’t grieve. Here’s how you can secure your personal email addresses from spam and unsolicited bulk emails (UBE).
Confuse the Spam BotsOne of the oldest tricks is not to post your email address in“plain” form online. Instead, you can disguise your email address bytyping it in a knotty way so that humans can still read and understandit, but bots cannot. For example, instead of writing “
[email protected]”,use “eric AT gmail DOT com”.
Use Disposable Email AddressThere are many times when you need to sign up for a site whichrequires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mailto. Instead of giving your personal email address (and get spammedlater), try using a disposable emails, which by the way, are free.
Few of these which we find very useful and user-friendly can befound at 10minutemail.com, www.mintemail.com and www.guerrillamail.com.All these sites will give you a temporary e-mail address. Any e-mailssent to that address will show up automatically on the web page. Youcan read them, click on links, and even reply to them. The e-mailaddress will expire after a certain period of time, usually more thansufficient for the intended purpose.
Fancy a permanent disposable email instead? Then get it from Yahoo!AddressGuard which is part of Yahoo! Mail. It lets you createdisposable email addresses to use whenever you don’t want to give outyour real Yahoo! Mail address, but when you do think you’ll probablywant to receive what this source sends you—a receipt, or an invoice, orsome other valid communication. You can create many alternate addressesand access them all from your Yahoo! Mail account. If any of yourdisposable addresses starts getting spam, just delete that address.It’s that simple!
Never Respond to a SpamIf you receive an unsolicited bulk email (UBE) and suspect it’s aspam, never ever respond to it. Do not fall prey by clicking on theUnsubscribe link as this will only verified that your email address isindeed genuine! Just ignore these emails and trash them.
Identify Your Spammer Source (
for Gmail users only)
Many of us might not know that, by adding a plus sign (+) and afilter tag to your own Gmail address, you can track which of the sitesthat you’ve given your address to are selling your email addresses tospammer on the net! To do this, just use the plus and tag every timeyou enter your address into an online form. The trick is to use thename of the site you’re visiting as the tag, so it’s easier to tracklater on.
Soif you are buying something from ABC.com, enter your email address
[email protected]. Gmail will ignore the plus sign and everythingthat comes after it, so messages sent to that address will still maketheir way to you. But if that site sells your address to spammers, youcan easily identify it by looking at the Sent To address in the header.When this happens, you can use Gmail’s Create a Filter settings toblock and direct all future emails to Trash automatically.
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