Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE, also known as spam) is for most people the single greatest annoyance on the internet. It clogs inboxes and mailservers and costs a lot of money.
Once your e-mail address is found by spammers you will start receiving spam on it. And you will receive more and more, because your address will be sold to other spammers. And if you use the unsubscribe option some spam offers chances are that you will start receiving even more spam, because you just confirmed that you read email that is delivered to that address.
Despite of the very advanced Primerelay spamfilters there are some simple steps you can take to prevent spam ever reaching you:
- Never use unsubscribe or remove-me links
Almost all unsubscribe or remove options presented in spam do not work. Instead of unsubscribing you confirm your address and in fact tell the spammer you read the e-mail which arrives at that address. The address you entered will be traded, sold and pressed on CD's containing millions of e-mail addresses which in turn will be bought by other spammers.
- Protect your e-mail address(es)
If you want to put an e-mail address on your website do not use your personal one, but use a generic address like sales@, info@ or contact@.
If you're going to participate in forums or Usenet discussions you can create seperate addresses for this through the Primerelay CCC. You can also use our plussed addressing feature to create a seperate address for these activities, for example yourname+usenet@yourdomain.tld. You do not need to create such an address through the CCC, all addresses (forwards and POP3 boxes) can have an extra part behind a + sign.
Don't enter your personal e-mail address when signing up for services on the internet or leaving personal info at webstores. Some parties will sell your emailaddress to other companies and you may end up being spammed after all. The above mentioned plussed addressing can also help here, you can for example sign up at Yahoo using yourname+yahoo@yourdomain.tld. Using this technique also creates an easy identifier for sorting your email to different folders.
