How to Avoid Spam — Mystery Shopper's Manual

In a previous article I shared some of the hazards of using a challenge/response system to keep spam out of your inbox. Let’s look at some things you can do that will reduce or eliminate spam without the problems of challenge/response.

Don’t post your email address publicly in forums or on your website. Spammers use software to harvest email addresses from the web, and posting your email address on a public website guarantees that you will get more spam.

Be careful where you share your address. Before you give your email address at a website, make sure that you are on the site you think you are on. Some sites look deceptively similar to others. Then, look for signs that the site will not give or sell your address to anyone else. Each of my websites has a privacy policy that says I will use your email address to send what you have requested (e.g., an email course, newsletters and updates, or receipts and other information related to purchases). I don’t send other emails and I don’t share email addresses with any other person or company.

Know when to unsubscribe, and when not to. When you signed up to receive emails (such as daily offers or an email newsletter) and you decide you don’t want them anymore, that doesn’t mean they are spam. You asked to receive them by subscribing, so just unsubscribe and the emails will stop. Look for an unsubscribe link at the bottom of one of the email messages. True spam (stuff like the drug ads and scams) will often not have an unsubscribe link.

So, if you asked to receive it in the first place, click unsubscribe to stop it. If you didn’t subscribe, then clicking unsubscribe or “spam”or whatever probably won’t do anything to stop it. If you don’t knowwhether you subscribed or not, click the unsubscribe link.

Avoid “guessable” email addresses. Spammers often use a database to construct possible email addresses at major email providers. For example, they may put together names such as “johnsmith,” “maryjohnson” and others with domains such as yahoo.com, gmail.com, aol.com, etc. They know that many of these will be valid addresses. They are not targeting those specific people, just assuming that the common names will be in use at those domains. The same goes for certain words and word combinations.

Use disposable email addresses for some email. There are services (including Yahoo!) that will give you the option of creating multiple addresses so you can use a unique email address for each purpose. With Yahoo!, you create a base name that is different from your Yahoo! ID. Let’s say your base name is myname. Each disposable address you create is the base name followed by a name you give it. For example, a disposable address you use to sign up with a mystery shopping forum might be myname-msforum@yahoo.com. If you start
getting spam to that address, you can just delete it without affecting other uses of your Yahoo! email address. See this link for more information on using disposable addresses in Yahoo! http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/mailplus/addressguard/addressguard-03.html

Let Gmail filter out the spam. This is what I do. All of my email addresses forward to a Gmail account. Then I download my email from Gmail onto my computer. (That step isn’t necessary. Gmail has a nice web interface. I just like having my email on my own computer.) Although Gmail’s filters are very, very good, they are not perfect. A few spam emails get through, and a few real emails get put into spam. But it works better than other spam filters I have used. This video from Don Crowther explains more. http://www.doncrowther.com/featured/getridofspam

Although nothing is foolproof or perfect when it comes to avoiding spam, these tips will help you to reduce the amount of unwanted email that lands in your inbox.