How can you reduce your spam exposure?

While OnlyMyEmail's service will intercept the vast majority of unsolicited junk email that is sent to your account, there a few things that you can do to minimize the amount of unwanted incoming messages.

Conceal Your Address on Web Sites

One of the spammer's best weapons is what's commonly known as an address harvesting bot that scours the Internet and extracts any email addresses openly displayed on web sites.

If you have your own web site, be sure to use the OnlyMyEmail Encoder to prevent these address harvesters from capturing your email addresses.

Be Careful With Your Address

Clearly, signing up for contests, sweepstakes and other online marketing promotions will no doubt result in your email address being used for mass-marketing campaigns.

While most people realize this, fewer understand that placing your email address on a web site (which includes many user-groups, news-groups and other web-based discussions) will also likely result in your account receiving quite a bit of spam.

This is because web-browsing software has been developed for the sole purpose of reading web pages and extracting any email addresses that are found.

If you must post your email address on a web site, it's considered a good practice to disguise the address by replacing the "@" sign with some other characters.

For instance, if you display your address as "Jones-AT-Earthlink.net" most humans can figure out your address if they wish to write you, but this will successfully fool the majority of automated email extraction software programs.

Protect Your Friend's Addresses

If you're sending friends and acquaintances web-based greeting cards, signing them up for online contests, forwarding news articles, maps, or commercial emails or giving out their email addresses to Web sites for any reason whatsoever, then you're simply turning them over to the junk marketers.

No matter how innocent a web site may sound, if they ask for the email addresses of your friends, then they're generally going to use those addresses to send unwanted junk email, and they'll probably use yours too!

Even worse, the addresses collected from such activities are generally sold to other mass-marketers, so volunteering an email address in this way can ultimately result in thousands upon thousands of junk email solicitations sent to both you and your friends.

Keep in mind that retrieving, viewing or responding to emails that tell you "A Friend Has Sent You An On-line Greeting Card" (or survey, invitation or anything else that you are supposed to respond to, visit or retreive) simply verifies that your email address is valid, and this will most likely result in more spam sent to you in the future!

Finally, a number of commercial services offer to place graphics and animations into your outgoing emails, and for free. Sounds like a great deal, right? What few (if any) users realize is that these "free" animations and graphics place tracking codes in each and every email you send! Not only do these "bugged" messages know your address, but they also collect the addresses of each and every person you email. Using such services effectively converts your personal address book into one big "verified" email address list.

Should You "Unsubscribe?"

The typical Spam email contains removal instructions so that you can presumably get off of the sender's marketing list. However, unless the message originates from a reputable web site, requesting removal of your email address will likely result in receiving more junk email, not less.

Reputable companies cannot afford to go back on their word, so if Yahoo, Amazon or Kmart is sending you promotional email and you want off, go ahead and follow the removal instructions. Such firms will most likely honor your request.

On the other hand, if the spam is from some company or organization you've never heard of (usually pushing products or services of dubious value) then you probably don't want to send a reply of any sort. To do so would simply enhance the market value of your email address, as you're now what they refer to as "verified" email address.

Instead of being removed from the junk marketer's list, your reply simply proved that your email account is both valid and active. As a result, your address will most likely be sold to (and used by) spam marketers even more often than before!

Problems With "Catch-all Aliasing"

If you have your own domain, then you should verify that your host does not enable "catch-all" or "default" email addressing on your account.

If enabled, this would allow a spammer or virus to send to any fictional address at your domain, and your host will deliver the message to a "default" account. The result is that a spammer could send email to:

- a@yourdomain.com
- ab@yourdomain.com
- abc@yourdomain.com
- abcd@yourdomain.com

And every other variation they care to try. If you find that you're receiving countless copies of the exact same spam emails, and you have your own domain, then this type of aliasing may be the problem.