I do. It’s a waste of time and never achieves anything. To date I have not come across anything useful or interesting from all the spam that I have received. That’s so strange right? I mean we receive so many mails in spam daily and yet not even one of these spam mails has ever contained anything interesting or useful even remotely in all these years. Talk about underachievement. I am sure it will be hard to beat the dubious achievements of spam mail in all these years. As I was reading BBC today, I came across an article “Spam experiment overloads inboxes” where it stated “Surfing the web unprotected will leave the average web user with 70 spam messages each day, according to an experiment by security firm McAfee.” It made for interesting reading and got me thinking too.
McAfee lists the Global Spam League as:
- US – 23,233
- Brazil – 15,856
- Italy – 15,610
- Mexico – 12,229
- UK – 11,965
- Australia – 9,214
- The Netherlands – 6,378
- Spain – 5,419
- France – 2,597
- Germany – 2,331
McAfee also lists the Top Ten Most Popular Spam Categories as:
- Advertisements
- Financial
- Health and medicine
- Adult services
- Free stuff
- Education
- IT related
- Money making
- Credit cards
- Watch adverts
You will find a lot of resources on the internet on how to protect yourself from spam. I have just 3 points to share about protecting yourself from spam.
Firstly, get yourself a spam email ID for those occasions and instances wherein you have to submit an email ID to either register on a forum or a website, or you need to provide an email ID to download something that is free just so that your email ID is harvested for further marketing. It pays to create an email ID for such purposes and it pays so much more to keep it separate from your personal email ID. My personal email ID is just that, PERSONAL! I don’t give it out to anyone and the only people who have access to it are my family, friends and relatives. For everyone else who is not on that list I have a spam email ID that I give out.
Secondly, use a good email provider like Gmail or Yahoo. I know it’s considered cool and the in-thing to have your own domain and to have your own email ID that’s not common or generic like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com and I do agree with this. However, what you can do is forward all emails to Gmail or Yahoo and use the excellent spam filters provided by them to keep your email clean. I have all my mail forwarded to my Gmail account and like everything Google does Gmail too is excellent and absolutely rocks. Gmail even has free email Forwarding and POP/IMAP so you can forward all your emails from Gmail to another account or even pull them to Outlook or any other email client you use. Yahoo unfortunately charges for these features.
Thirdly and most importantly, never open or click on any spam email as this will immediately notify the sender that your email is active and you can expect a hundredfold increase in spam. Also, mark spam emails as spam and notify the email provider so that these email IDs and domains get added to the spam filters and get marked as spam henceforth. I have done these two things regularly and can very assuredly say that I find spam email very rarely in my inbox. All spam is directed to the spam folder and never to my inbox since I follow these points religiously always.
Do the above immediately and you will find that spam gets sent to where it should, the spam box and not your inbox. If you have any improvements or suggestions, do let me know so that even I can implement them.
Tags: Email, Free Email Forwarding, Global Spam League, Gmail, Google!, How To Protect Yourself From Spam, IMAP, McAfee, POP, Spam, Spam Email, Top Ten Most Popular Spam Categories, Yahoo, Yahoo Mail