Sometimes, we are troubled by the number of spam emails we get in our inbox every day. Where do they come from? In most cases, we help spammers unknowingly send us even more spam emails. But, if we follow some simple rules, it can help us to a great extent. It may not stop spam emails completely but can reduce them significantly.

How to stop spam emails?

Please find some simple techniques below that can help in stopping spam emails :

• Share your email address only among a limited group of correspondents.
• Avoid forwarding emails to recipients who do not know each other. It is a good practice to keep all the recipients in the ‘bcc’ field. This can avoid the scenario where an unscrupulous recipient may compile email addresses for spamming purposes.
• Posting anonymously or with fake names and addresses can prevent email address harvesting. But make sure, the used email address is not valid at all.
• If you are posting your email address on a website, make sure at least some part of the email address is readable only by human beings. For example, you can write an email address as john [AT] example [DOT] com. This can prevent automated email harvesters from collecting email addresses in an automated way.
• Avoid responding to spam emails, not even “Do not spam me.” Replying to spam emails can confirm to spammers that the email address is valid. And they can exploit the information to make even more attacks.
• By default, disable HTML in email. Spam written in HTML can contain web bugs. These bugs can confirm to the spammers that the email address is valid when the receiver opens the email with HTML enabled.
• If you have to give a valid email address to a website without getting proper assurance that it won’t be used for spamming purposes, use a disposable email address.
• Using tarpits (What is a tarpit?) like greylisting or greeting delays can be an effective method of preventing email spams. An email administrator can do that.

No technique is a complete solution for stopping spam emails. There is always a trade-off between rejecting legitimate emails and not rejecting all spam emails. But if we can follow some simple rules as stated above. Perhaps it will help us a lot.