Tips to Avoid Spam Email

Spam emails have been a problem for many online users. They can be a source of annoyance. Receiving such emails can be likened to an invasion of privacy and personal online space considering that spam emails are sent without the recipient's consent. But there are ways that spam emails can be avoided.

Spam emails proliferate in the online world. Most of the times, if you are a frequent visitor on the Internet checking emails, surfing websites and the like, sooner or later spammers may get hold of your email address and then you start receiving hundreds of bulk emails from addresses that you don't know about. But all is not lost. There are ways that you can help avoid being one of the spammer's victims. Here are some tips that will help you avoid spam emails from ruining your life.

Use disposable email addresses

Since spammers make use of your email address to send out the bulk emails, it is important that you take good care of your primary email address so that it would not get into the wrong hands. You can instead use a disposable email address for purposes of using when filling up online forms.

Never try to give out your primary email address since spammers may get hold of it. Through a disposable email address, spammers would send only spam mail through the disposable email address. Once it does receive them, you can then disable it so that all the spam mail sent to you would be returned to the sender.

Carefully look at the checkboxes on the Web.

Many times you may have encountered signing up for something on the web and you see a page with checkboxes that may allow others to get hold of your email address. These checkboxes may sometimes be checked by default so as to make it show that you are giving your consent the third parties to send bulk emails.

When such a checkbox may be left unchecked, it may allow third parties to send out your email address to others that may send out various spam emails to you. To avoid this, try to look closely at forms that you fill up on the Web and make sure that all relevant checkboxes are not ticked.

Disguise email address in visited sites.

Once your email address is placed online, there are many ways that spammers may get hold of them. They can use special programs that can extract email addresses found to contain in websites, chat rooms, comment sections in forums, blogs and in newsgroups. One way that you can avoid spammers from getting your email address this way is by disguising it.

Obscuring your email address is one thing that will help avoid spammers from sending you spam emails. You can do this the simple way by inserting something obvious somewhere in your email address so that programs will not detect them or that emails sent on them will bounce. But make sure that humans who see the obscured email address will be able to get the trick enough to allow them to determine the right email address.