Stopping Spam for Free
Spam is a nuisance and it doesn't matter whether you're employed or unemployed, a CEO or a work at home parent; spam affects us all. There are dozens of programs available for fighting spam. However, most of these programs cost money. Below are different ways of combating spam for free.
 Don't give your personal email address
This is stating the obvious but it's the first big mistake people make. Do not use your personal email address for sign up forms, competitions, surveys or any other nonsense that may result in you being spammed. It's much easier to prevent spam, by never giving out your personal email address, than it is to cure the problem once you're on 100's of junk email lists.
Use a free email account
Set yourself up with a Hotmail, Yahoo or any other free email account and use it as a spam holder account i.e. use it on all those popups or sign up forms that you *suspect* may try to spam you. You can then periodically check your free email account for both legitimate and spam email and delete the rubbish you don't want. This single step can save you countless spam related headaches.
Use a disposable email address
You could also try a disposable e-mail address from Spam Gourmet. This is a brilliant idea. Once you've registered your forwarding email address (your personal email address) with them you can then create self-destructing email addresses that stop working after receiving a specific number of emails.
Use a free spam filter.
Unfortunately even when you follow all the correct steps you can still wind up getting junk email. There's only solution at that point - install a spam filter on your PC. An excellent program that won't cost you a penny is MailWasher.
 Spam Do’s:
· Keep your address book updated. Make sure that people you want to keep in contact with are in your contact list.
· Activate image blocking. Visit your email settings or preferences and turn off automatic image download. First of all, this will save you from shock seeing offensive images. (Handy tip if you have kids around the computer!) Second, images can notify the sender that your email address is active and you’ll get more spam.
· Treat your personal email address like gold. Don’t give it away right and left. Have a separate secondary email account for this purpose. Give your primary email address only to people you know personally.
· Use a complicated username. Include random letters and numbers in your email address, like kgb49@website.com. These types of addresses are much harder to guess and it will help you from receiving junk emails.
 Spam Don’ts:
· Do not post your email address on forums, websites, blogs, etc. If you publish your email address on a website, spammers will find it with software that crawls millions of web pages searching for addresses to automatically add to their list.
· Never register your real email address for services like group chats, forums, usenet groups. Create a separate fake email for this purpose (for example, at hotmail.com). Check it one a month to delete all the spam emails in one minute and get a sense of satisfaction that all this junk hasn’t reached your inbox!
· Never try to unsubscribe from spam email. Actually, never click any link on spam email. It confirms that your email address is active and you will receive more spam. Also, don’t reply to spam messages.
· Never buy anything advertised in spam. No respected company would advertise via such methods and it is definitely not safe to trust them with your credit card number.
· Don’t forward chain emails to your friends. This is a real pet-peeve of mine. They are perfect for spammers, even though the person who has sent you this had no such intent. Stop it, stop it, stop it!
PROMOTIONAL
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