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I created my first Gmail account 3 years back. For  almost 6 -9 months, I hardly got less than 10 spam mails everyday. But now everyday I receive not less than 40-50 spam mails. Over the years from my mistakes, I learned where I went wrong. Here are some suggestions that you may try to avoid getting too much spam mails in the future.

Spam mails are unsolicited commercial email which tries to sell you something which you haven’t requested. This was the definition of spam mails in the beginning when everybody just started using internet and emails. But now, spam mails are much more than that.

Spam mails may

• Carry commercial content which you are never interested
• Carry lewd vulgar message or images
• Malware code writers are using spam as a medium to get to more people’s computer. These messages carry spyware, virus or malware codes which is used to infect the PC and gather user information
• A lot of computing power is unnecessarily wasted for processing these spam mails.
• The email servers, email hosting accounts, networks, servers and the IT staff waste a considerable amount of time trying to prevent spam. If they don’t process these spam properly on a daily basis, it will later create more issues for them

 How spammers get your contact details

• Spammers constantly try to obtain email addresses from mailing lists. Some webmasters share their subscriber list with spammers for monetary purpose.
• Spammers can get the email addresses from ISP’S database
• Emails can be obtained from social networking websites and forums.
• From guests books and registration forms
• From IRC and chat rooms
• Dictionary attack
• White & yellow pages which are offered by some websites are also excellent source for the spammers to get the email id’s
• From the address list and email on other’s computer. Even if you don’t give away your email address, hacking one of your friend’s computer is enough for the spammer to get your email address
• By hacking into websites which have a huge list of customer email address
• Spammers use software’s like ‘spiders’ or ‘email harvesters’ which crawl into websites and find out anything which is written before and after the sign ‘@’.This way they can collect a lot of emails. Some people try to avoid this by using ‘at’ in space of ‘@’. For e.g. ‘obama at hotmail.com‘.But the software that spammers use today, are smart enough to detect this as well.

 Best practices to prevent Spam mails

• Never reply or try to unsubscribe to a spam mail. By replying to these mails, you are certifying the spammer that you got a valid email address
• Don’t click on any links in the spam mails as it may download malicious code to your computer
• Use Junk email filters if possible. Some of them are free to try.
• Don’t respond to mails requesting for personal details, unless you are sure it is coming from a genuine site. Even if it is coming from a genuine website, make sure that they are asking for details for matters that you are already aware of.
• Use multiple email addresses for different purpose. For e.g., I use a different email address for my official purpose, a different one for my Triond and other publishing stuff, a different one for social networking and another free email account for chat, forums and other communication purposes. This makes sure that I receive very less spam in my official mail.
• Don’t disclose your email openly in any forums or social networking sites.
• If disclosing your email address publically in websites, use special characters. For e.g., yourname@domain.c0m, here ‘o’ is replaced by ‘zero’
• Don’t respond to mass forwarding lists
• Don’t give your original email to any new sites, unless you are sure that they won’t spam you. Read their ‘Terms and Conditions’ and privacy policy for more details.
• When registering in websites, look for the already checked check boxes as it might be for forwarding your details to their sister websites.
• Preview your message before opening them. Some email providers and software’s like Outlook gives you that facility
• Use a complicated name for email address which have characters like ‘.’ Or ‘_’ between them, if allowed by the email service provider
• Don’t give your email address in chat window and don’t respond to any suspicious chat windows which pop out with a link listed inside