No matter how good your spam filter is some is going to get through and land right in your inbox. While no one can completely eliminate SPAM there are some things you can do to keep it to a minimum. First I’ll start off by telling you how the spammers work then I’ll get into some practical ways to combat this electronic refuse.
How the heck do they get my address in the first place?
That’s an excellent question here are several ways they do it:
- Off of your personal web page
- Off your company’s contact information
- Off your MySpace or other publicly available social networking site
- They have a dictionary program that systematically generates all possible combinations of email address.
- You sign up for a mailing list from a company you trust and the cheeky bastards sell your address
- and the list goes on….
Mostly, these Spammers will harvest names using programs that crawl the web. As soon as their spider finds an address it adds you to their list. Pretty nasty eh? So once they have your address they will send you an e-mail asking you to buy anything from Iphones to Viagra. Now these guys/gals are pretty crafty. Remember, they got past all those smart people who made the SPAM filter. Not every name that is on their list is going to be valid and being a busy spammer they only want to send their e-mails to valid address. These impolite marketers have devised a way to find out if an address is good or bad and I hate to say it, but more than likely, you’ve fallen for their trick and not even known it.
Usually at the bottom of their e-mail will be a link that reads something like: “If you no longer wish to received e-mails from us, click this link to be removed”. That is the trap! By clicking that link you have told them that a real person actually got this mail so it’s time to blast them with more junk. The link isn’t the only way they verify your address. Sometimes you’ll get SPAM that is written in HTML. Essentially these e-mails are made the same way people make web pages. When you open the e-mail, that mail will download a little image from the internet and BAM now you have let them know your address is valid. I told you they were crafty.
So what can you do to reduce SPAM?
1. Get your e-mail address off of publicly available web pages.
Use a contact form instead of a direct link to your e-mail address.If you can’t use a contact form at least write out your address out long hand i.e. MyEmailAddress A-T MyDomain D-O-T com .
2. Never open e-mail from an address that you suspect is SPAM
This can be tough especially if you get mail from a lot of different people. What you can do is turn off your internet connection before you open a suspicious e-mail. I use my firewall to turn off all internet traffic. You can download a free firewall from Zone Labs Here.
3. Never Ever click an “Unsubscribe Link” from an untested sender
If you had signed up for a newsletter or mailing from a reputable company then by all means use the unsubscribe link. An honest company will be more than happy to honor your request since they have a reputation to uphold.
4. Use free e-mail accounts from places like Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo when you sign up for newsletters, coupons, or any site that may try to send you junk in the future.
It’s better to have the spammer sending junk to your Hotmail account that you can dump then your real one that all your friends, family, and coworkers know.
5. ADVANCED Tip: Use e-mail forwards to identify compromised e-mails
If you have your own web site you probably have the ability to set up an e-mail forwarder. Essentially, you create a fake address. All the mail sent to the fake address gets forwarded to your real address. Make the address easy to identify like: CompanyName@YourDomain.com. That way when you get a SPAM message you can see who sent it to you and all you have to do is delete the forwarder. Now, there is no way that spamming company can send you any more stuff since the forwarder is gone and they never knew your real e-mail.
So there you have it 5 ways to help reduce the amount of junk email floating around your inbox.
Have you ever had the dreaded moment when you meet someone interesting and were completely out of business cards? This normally happens to me when I’m at a party. I don’t know about you, but when I’m headed to a back yard bar-b-q or raging house party, bringing my business cards is the last thing I worry about. Last weekend I ran into some people that were interested in doing some business so I had to do the perfunctory slap your pocket where the business card would have been like you were going to grab one and apologize for coming back empty handed. Well fellow networking professionals, you can send and receive contact info by sending text messages with your cell phone. So far, I’ve found 3 services that do just that with out typing out an epic text.
When I was a kid I wanted to be rich. Not a football player, not an astronaut; rich is what I wanted. I grew up in the era of Gordon Gecko, Alex P. Keaton, and that bad ass Scrooge McDuck with the swimming pool full of money. Of course, there are people who tell you that money doesn’t buy happiness. Ironically, only my broke buddies say that. That’s like having a fat person tell you running is bad for your knees.
For many years my business has been doing internet marketing for my own portfolio of web sites. In the past year I’ve expanded my business by providing 
