Keep Spam out of your Inbox

Do you know that nine out of every ten e-mails delivered over the internet is spam? Gmail, Yahoo and other such portals are continuously improving their anti-spam algorithms but the problem is far from getting over.

And spammers are finding more innovative ways to deliver spam – they now hide the advertisement text inside the image attachments which sometimes trick the spam filters of the e-mail program.

Junk e-mail messages hurt the productivity. The only foolproof method to prevent e-mail spam is to never ever share your e-mail address with anyone, even your wife. If that sounds a bit too impractical, here are some other ‘practical’ suggestions:

Don’t share your personal e-mail address on the Internet mailing lists and discussion boards. These are the favourite hunting grounds for spam-bots and e-mail harvesters. Always create a separate ID for places where you expect to get spammed.

Some websites require visitors to register with their e-mail address before letting them in. you type in your e-mail address, they send you an e-mail to confirm the address and then allow you in.

Would you share your personal e-mail address with a third-party website just to view their webpage? This may sometimes lead to unsolicited marketing e-mails entering your inbox. Luckily, we have a neat solution here – use a disposable e-mail address.

A service called 10MinuteMail.com creates a temporary e-mail address for you which expire after, as the name suggests, exactly ten minutes. You can successfully register on websites using this use-n-throw e-mail address and keep your private e-mail inbox safe and clean. All the junk mails sent to this disposable e-mail address, after it has expired, will bounce back to the spammer.

In situations where you want people to reach you over e-mail but are still wary of sharing your address with them, a clever alternative is Contactify.com that turns your e-mail address into a web contact form. Contactify creates a special webpage for your e-mail address. Anyone can contact you via e-mail through this webpage but your actual address remains hidden. You can share this webpage URL in message boards, mailing lists or e-mail footers without worrying about spam.