Art by Jeffrey Bennett blog

Few people like the meat in a can that is Spam™, and I'm sure even fewer like the spam that invades their e-mail inbox. The other day, I checked an e-mail account that I hadn't opened in about a month. When I signed in, the page listing all of the messages showed 1 - 50 of 13,477. I realize that I'm a popular guy, but this is ridiculous! Anyways, I couldn't find a single message that was legit. I got to thinking about how people could have gotten the address, because when I did use it, I never gave it out to anyone that I didn't routinely talk with. Because of this, I came up with some tips to use to avoid getting added to spammer's e-mail A-Lists.

1. Find out who sent the message. While this may seem obvious, sometimes messages get opened by accident or when the reader is in a hurry. If the e-mail is from someone you don't know, or if you're not expecting an e-mail from anyone in particular, open it with caution. A feature often built-in to e-mail clients called read receipts allow the sender to find out when a message has been opened by getting a notification from the reader's e-mail account. Read receipts include your e-mail address, so whenever these are sent back to the spammer... well, you might just have to kiss your spam-free inbox goodbye!
2. Avoid chain letters like the plague! I can't tell you how many e-mails I get, telling me I'm going to have bad luck for the next 10 years if I don't forward the e-mail to fifty friends. Let me tell you, I have yet to get hit by a school bus carrying disabled children, or get attacked by a ferocious dog with rabies! These kinds of e-mails are generally completely pointless, but they are gold mines for spammers. Have you ever noticed how many legitimate e-mail addresses are contained within these messages? If you get these, do your friends, coworkers, and e-mail buddies a favor - break the chain and please, please, please do not forward these e-mails to anyone!
3. Create an e-mail account purely for possible spam. These days, whenever you register an account with a website or online service (like an ArtByJB.com account), a valid and active e-mail address is very often required to join. For legitimate websites, this drastically cuts down on fake profiles and accounts whenever users have to verify that they own the e-mail address. If you do happen to sign up for a website and get put onto their spam list with your new spam e-mail address, your real e-mail address is still as good as new!
4. Read the subject line! If you see a subject that looks something like Fwd: Re: FW[2]: RE: re: [FWD] joke, immediately move your mouse cursor to the delete button, and click - don't bother even opening the message if you can avoid it. Generally speaking, if the e-mail subject contains more than one "forward" indication ("Fwd", "Fw", etc), it is most likely a chain letter.
5. Read your e-mail messages in plain text. HTML e-mails very often give the sender's message that extra oomph needed to stand out and shine. They can contain pretty pictures and graphics, styling, and custom text links - essentially, HTML e-mails can display just about anything a normal web page can. As with any great technology, however, there are those that use HTML e-mails for not-so-honorable intentions. If you trust the sender, by all means, read their e-mail messages in HTML. Just make sure you decide to view the HTML content after you're sure it's from someone you trust.
6. Avoid posting your e-mail address on websites you don't trust. ArtByJB.com never publicly displays your e-mail address, but I can't speak for other websites. Whenever your e-mail is posted within a clickable e-mail link or publicly displayed, your e-mail address is susceptible to spidering. Spiders (also know as web crawlers and web robots) are programs designed to search the Internet, and catalog and index certain types of data. Some are used to find URLs and information about websites - such as with Google and other search engines. Others are made to find e-mail addresses and store them in a database for later spamming. It's always a good idea to prevent your e-mail address from being able to get spidered. There are many ways to do this. You can type your e-mail address in basic image creation software (such as Microsoft Paint), and then use the image instead of typing your e-mail address in the web page. You can also use JavaScript to encrypt the e-mail address such as with Dynamic Drive's E-mail Riddler. This is a fantastic way to do it, because to the human viewer, the JavaScript e-mail link looks and works exactly the same as a normal e-mail link. Spidering programs can't read an encrypted e-mail address within Javascript, so now you've got the best of both worlds. Plus, this method allows for page styling (through CSS), whereas with the image method, you have to update the image any time you want to change the look or font.

Treat your personal e-mail address like you would your home address. Give it out to people that you know and trust, but don't let just anyone find out where you live. The same applies to your business e-mail address - treat it the way you would your work address.

Hopefully, these tips will show you how to cut down on the amount of spam you get. Thanks for reading!