“Junk” or “spam” emails are mass-distributed, unsolicited emails usually promoting get-rich-quick schemes, fraudulent offers etc. Junk is inevitable if you have an email address, but there are measures you can take to curtail it. To understand spam, it’s important to understand why your email address might be tracked down in the first place.

If your email address can be found on your website, social networking site, or displayed anywhere else publicly on the internet then this means Email Harvesting Robots can locate your address. The majority of spam is received by people who have made their email address public in some way. If you need to be contacted via your website, a contact form is a good alternative , that way you’ll receive your communications in your inbox, just through a different medium. Or you might want to alter your email address so it’s understandable for people but not software programmes. Here are a few examples of jumbled email addresses software programmes won’t be able to understand:

johnREMOVETHISsmith@samplemail.com or johnsmith[at]samplemail[dot]com

When signing up for newsletters you’ll obviously want to receive emails for whatever you are signing up for but always be sure to uncheck any boxes asking if you’d like to be sent third party emails and communications. ‘Third parties’ will more than likely be spam emails from people or organisations that you have no interest in. Also consider usign ‘captcha’ tests, which you’ve probably seen before. You are presented with slightly disfigured letters and/or numbers and you have to copy them in order to submit a form. Software programmes cannot figure these Captcha tests out. Another way to disguise your email address is to include it as a picture rather than as text on a webpage, as harvesters cannot read the contents of images. You could create an attractive email logo or just write as plain text and convert that into an image.

Do not answer spammers! If you do accidentally open up junk mail, possibly to unsubscribe, be very careful. Clicking ‘unsubscribe’ may take you to a page to confirm your email address and then once it’s confirmed, you’ll be sent more spam.

Always use your junk filters; nowadays they are quite spam clever and can spot junk mail a mile off. If you’re sent spam mail in your inbox, put them in your list of blocked senders, or identify it as spam mail so you won’t receive emails from them in the future. If you often recieve emails from companies or newsletters you’ve signed up to, add them to the ‘safe sender’s list’ to avoid them going into your spam folder.

New to spam mail is the phishing scam – emails are sent in order to aquire your personal details. These spammers pretend to be from big corporations – usually banks. They suggest you have to click a link in the email to fix whatever problem that they claim there may be. By clicking that link you are forwarded to spoofed phishing websites that are rigged to steal personal data from you.

Never make lists of email addresses and if you do want to send an email to many, as part of an email marketing campaign for example, people use the BCC (blind copy) so your hefty email list isn’t shown.

You could also use a selection of different email accounts; one email for personal emails, one for newsletters and one for buying things online.

Author Bio: Dave Matthews is a freelance writer, writing on behalf of Extravision Email Marketing.

Category: Business
Keywords: email, marketing, business