Always collect an email address Anti-Spammers Need To Develop Better Manners

I'm sure you are tired of getting unsolicited emails from companies and other organizations with which you have no professional or personal contact. Unsolicited email, also called spam, is considered to be a nuisance by most people and a serious annoyance by many. If you feel like this is something that bothers you too, then read on.

In this post we will go through the dos and don'ts for anti-spamming tactics that could help change the tide in your favor when fighting off spam. Sadly these tactics work mostly on staying on top of the latest trends to bypass spam filters, but if nothing else it's a start.

Introducing...

The first trick that will help keep you on top of the game, is to never return a "Delivered" or "Received" confirmation from your mails. Spammers will be looking for these indicators to test whether you have actually received their emails or not. So never confirm your delivery by pressing the "OK" button in your email program, or no matter what do not press the link in an email that will confirm receipt. If you are using Microsoft Outlook (2003 and up) there is a setting that will block these indicators. To find out how this setting works, read our tutorial: How to stop spam with Microsoft Outlook 2003-2007 – Stay on Top of the Game .

Get a real email address!

The next thing you can do to keep your email address out of spammer's databases, is to get a real and valid email address. A valid email address contains the @ symbol, and your name or business name. Do not register with free email accounts like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, as these emails are very prone to spammers. The reason for this is that spammers use these kinds of addresses in their campaigns. This way they have many addresses from which they can send their spam. Also do not get creative by adding numbers to the end of an email; like xyz@yahoo.com .

If your email account is not secure, it's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to get a free or paid email account with a reliable anti-spammer company such as MailWasher . These services can help you to keep your email address clean and out of spammer's databases. Remember that if you are using one of these services, that those emails will be received by their "blacklists" and will get filtered by spam filters.

Keep an eye on the "Delivered" and "Received" indicators.

Another great idea is to make sure that your mail server is set up correctly so as to not deliver any spam mails. You can set up your mail server to enable it to send a "bounce" (non-delivery receipt) for any undeliverable or suspicious emails. Also, make sure that you set up your email program so that it won't display those unimportant indicators.

You can read our tutorial How To Set Up Your New Email Account – Deliverability and Filtering to find out about these settings.

How to "grok" the spammer's mentality?

Spammers use many types of tricks and tactics in order to get your attention for their junk-mail. One of these tactics is called "online surveys". Spammers always have an email address like data@survey.org, which they send an email to and ask you a question. The survey is either about computer hardware or software, or it's a survey on some other topic like "What is your favorite color?" or "What are your favorite foods?."

Due to the mass number of people that follow online surveys there are more chances of making a mistake and giving out your email address. When you receive an email from some strange address, if you want to be 100 percent sure that it is a spammer's campaigns use our tutorial: How To Use Web filters completely .

Conclusion

I hope you stayed the course and learned something new. I know that many of these tactics are not helpful but they will help you to end up with a less spammy email address. Whether or not these methods work for you, I guess it's just a question of time. If nothing else, get in contact with your favorite anti-spammer companies and ask them about the latest mail filtering techniques. If nothing else, you can always use them as templates for better spam protection in the future.

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