It’s difficult to completely avoid spam mails that may be sent to your e-mail account in hundreds or even thousands a day. Sooner or later “spam” senders will find out your email address and then you will be getting more and more total garbage that would take time to sort and delete from your mailbox.

One thing is sure – the things that work here are usually the most simple, like prevention of spam. Try to keep your e-mail address confidential – do not post it online, be careful when signing up at various sites. One thing that I have noticed not while ago is company websites – these often have “contact” or “about us” web pages with all their employees’ email addresses written down (what a desert for spamming services). Such obvious mistakes end up in being spammed with hundreds of total garbage messages per day.

Another quite effective thing is changing your email address once in a while, though it works only in corporate and business environments. It’s a tougher task to accomplish when your personal emails accounts are at stake, because not all your friends will notice the changes in your email address and make necessary changes in their address book.

If you are asked to register in any kind of website, make sure you read the terms and conditions, and the need for this information. If you are writing a comment on a particular publicly accessible web site, use your other (alternative) email address.

You can still leave your email address in your website, just write “ETA” (letters) instead of the @ symbol. This way you will be decreasing the chance that your address will be “stolen” by means of automated e-mail spam robots.

Mail spammers can also get your address from your friends or colleagues, if their computer is infected with the virus and it has a valid email address book kept in Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook or whatever mail program you have. Do not be surprised, if diligently keeping to all the anti spam, you will still get nasty messages about your p… enlargment. 

Finally, spam messages can be sent to random addresses in an attempt to guess the possible e-mail  address. Therefore, never reply to spam. Any response to such type of mail, even your answer does specify that you no longer wish to receive spam, click on links only proves spam distributor, that his letter was received, opened and read through, which means that he will most probably continue sending spam messages to your address.

To fight spam use spam blocking (anti-spam) measures that are installed and configured in mail servers like Google or Yahoo according to your needs (contact, message and content blocking, filtering, links, IP filtering and etc.)