How do I avoid getting spammed?
Tips to Deal With Spam
1. Prevention: Prevention is the best medicine so avoid giving your email address to unfamiliar recipients. Use more than one email address; one for friends, family and colleagues and second for unfamiliar sources. If you have an e-mail address that receives a large amount of spam replace it with a new address. Once your e-mail address is on a spammer's mailing lists, it is likely that you will receive increasing amounts of spam. At work, use your work email address only for work communication.
2. Use Filters: A second way to stop spam is to use your email application's filtering features. Most email applications allow you to block specific messages. When an offending email comes in, set the filter to block further incoming mails from that sender. At the network level, implementing spam and virus checking isn't very difficult. Depending on the mail server, implementing spam filtering such that it is able to reject spam before the SMTP session is over can be difficult.
3. Report Spammers: A more aggressive approach to ridding unwanted email is to report the e-mailer to the spammer's ISP. This is not always an easy task. First you must determine the spam's origins. Many of the bigger and more commercial ISPs forbid spammers from using their services and, once discovered, will actively ban the offending parties from using their services. To find the spam's origins, instruct your email program to display all of the email header information. View the "Received" lines, and working from top to bottom you can often pinpoint the origin of spam.
