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I'm sure you are tired of getting unsolicited emails from companies and other organizations with which you have no professional or personal contact. Unsolicited email, also called spam, is considered to be a nuisance by most people and a serious annoyance by many. If you feel like this is something that bothers you too, then read on.

In this post we will go through the dos and don'ts for anti-spamming tactics that could help change the tide in your favor when fighting off spam. Sadly these tactics work mostly on staying on top of the latest trends to bypass spam filters, but if nothing else it's a start.

Introducing...

The first trick that will help keep you on top of the game, is to never return a "Delivered" or "Received" confirmation from your mails. Spammers will be looking for these indicators to test whether you have actually received their emails or not. So never confirm your delivery by pressing the "OK" button in your email program, or no matter what do not press the link in an email that will confirm receipt. If you are using Microsoft Outlook (2003 and up) there is a setting that will block these indicators. To find out how this setting works, read our tutorial: How to stop spam with Microsoft Outlook 2003-2007 – Stay on Top of the Game .

Get a real email address!

The next thing you can do to keep your email address out of spammer's databases, is to get a real and valid email address. A valid email address contains the @ symbol, and your name or business name. Do not register with free email accounts like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, as these emails are very prone to spammers. The reason for this is that spammers use these kinds of addresses in their campaigns. This way they have many addresses from which they can send their spam. Also do not get creative by adding numbers to the end of an email; like xyz@yahoo.com .

If your email account is not secure, it's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to get a free or paid email account with a reliable anti-spammer company such as MailWasher . These services can help you to keep your email address clean and out of spammer's databases. Remember that if you are using one of these services, that those emails will be received by their "blacklists" and will get filtered by spam filters.

Keep an eye on the "Delivered" and "Received" indicators.

Another great idea is to make sure that your mail server is set up correctly so as to not deliver any spam mails. You can set up your mail server to enable it to send a "bounce" (non-delivery receipt) for any undeliverable or suspicious emails. Also, make sure that you set up your email program so that it won't display those unimportant indicators.

You can read our tutorial How To Set Up Your New Email Account – Deliverability and Filtering to find out about these settings.

How to "grok" the spammer's mentality?

Spammers use many types of tricks and tactics in order to get your attention for their junk-mail. One of these tactics is called "online surveys". Spammers always have an email address like data@survey.org, which they send an email to and ask you a question. The survey is either about computer hardware or software, or it's a survey on some other topic like "What is your favorite color?" or "What are your favorite foods?."

Due to the mass number of people that follow online surveys there are more chances of making a mistake and giving out your email address. When you receive an email from some strange address, if you want to be 100 percent sure that it is a spammer's campaigns use our tutorial: How To Use Web filters completely .

Conclusion

I hope you stayed the course and learned something new. I know that many of these tactics are not helpful but they will help you to end up with a less spammy email address. Whether or not these methods work for you, I guess it's just a question of time. If nothing else, get in contact with your favorite anti-spammer companies and ask them about the latest mail filtering techniques. If nothing else, you can always use them as templates for better spam protection in the future.

ASP.NET Tutorial: Databinding Tutorial - Part 9 continues where part 8 left of...For more

How To Stop Spam In Your Inbox

There is nothing more annoying than spam. It's time consuming, it takes up space in your inbox, and it seems like there are more and more ways we can get hit with unsolicited content. This tutorial will provide you with some anti-spamming tactics that will help you to fight the good fight against spammers and not get sucked into their vortex of lies. First we'll go over some important do's and don'ts for keeping your email address clean before moving ahead to the next part: setting up your email account so that it won't deliver any spams or unsolicited messages.

Do not use a free email or freemail such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, or AOL Mail. These are addresses that everyone uses and that are very prone to spam. You probably won't even see the spam, but you will be accumulating a lot of useless emails in your inbox. If you have a .edu email address (i.e., something ending in .edu), then you are also prone to getting spammed. Of course this is not always the case, but these email addresses have been used for free email accounts for many years and it's still happening today. If you are using one of these emails, there are many email services that will help you to keep your account clean. If you use a .com email address then that's ideal for your case; and if you have a .net or .org email address then it's even better.

What Are The Spammer Tactics?

The first thing that spammers want is your email address. Whenever they can, spammers will try to entice users to give away their email address with fake online surveys, fake freebies or special offers. So the first tactic is obvious: never take any online "surveys" from unknown sources! If an offer sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. As mentioned above, if you get an email from a strange address, then use our tutorial: How To Use Webs Filters Completely .

Another tactic that spammers use is by sending emails that appear to come from your friends, relatives or people you know, but actually they don't. These types of emails usually have words that will make you curious and take action. Here are some examples: "Check out this website I found!", "Do you know about this?", or "Check out this picture I took!". You can try to fight these types of spam by adding words such as bogus or spam in front of the subject line when it comes in.

The third type of tactic that spammers use is to send a mass email blast with the same message to thousands of users. It doesn't matter if the recipients are not interested in the content, it's just a number game. Obviously, these emails are also annoying because they take up space in your inbox and make you want to go find all those unsubscribe links to get rid of them all. You can fight this spam by using our tutorial: How To Use Web filters completely .

How Do I Avoid Spam?

There are many different methods that you can use in order to keep your email addresses clean from spam messages.

Conclusion

I hope that you stay the course and learn something new. I know that these methods are not perfect, but they will help you to end up with less spammy email addresses. Also, if nothing else, get in contact with your favorite anti-spammer companies and ask them about the latest anti-spamming techniques. If nothing else, you can always use them as templates for better anti-spam protection in the future.

ASP.NET Tutorial: Databinding Tutorial - Part 8 continues where part 7 left off...For more information on ASP.NET's databinding data access system...or another tutorial on databinding...

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