Over the last couple of months, you may have noticed an increase in the amount of spam coming through. I know I did, and have gone from receiving four of five e-mails, through to almost thirty a day. An interesting article in Internet week discusses the spike in e-mail Spam recently: http://internetweek.cmp.com/193500922?cid=rssfeed_pl_inw A few tips to remember to help ensure you don't open yourself to spammers are:
- Don't display your e-mail address on your website, use an online form as a contact point for your website visitors. There are programs out there that scour the internet searching for e-mail addresses purely for spam purposes. The form will generally still send the enquiry through to you by e-mail, but if it is created properly then there is no risk of a spammer being able to get a hold of the e-mail address it is being sent to.
- If you are using an e-mail address on any website directories, use one you can easily change at a later stage if spam to that e-mail address gets out of control.
- Create a hotmail address specifically for signing up to newsletters, free software or anything on the web that asks for your e-mail address, unless it is very well known company that strictly follows its privacy principles. That way if they sell your e-mail address to spammers, then you can let hotmail take care of filtering the spam.
Spam is an unfortunate evil we need to put up with, and will not be going away anytime soon, but if you follow the tips above you can at least lessen how much you will receive.
