4) Have an 'All Purpose' email address like a Yahoo or a Hotmail email address to post in forums, chat rooms etc. The email you receive to these addresses are web-based. You can read your Yahoo or Hotmail email messages on your Yahoo or Hotmail account on their web site without downloading them into your computer. You can delete all spam right from those web sites.

5) If you have your own web site and have to give out your email address for people to contact you, you can 'cloak' your email address by substituting HTML code for '@' symbol. This way, email harvesting robots will not be able to extract your email address from your web site.

When you cloak your email address, you can include an active email link such as 'Contact me' or 'Email me.' When your contact clicks on active email link, her email program will open with your email address in 'To' box.

6) Never ever buy anything from a spam email. The information you give out to a spammer could be used for illegal purposes. You could probably end up being a victim of identity theft.

7) Black List every spammers email addresses.

To do this, you have to find email address of spammer. Most spammers do not give their email addresses in 'From' box of email or they give a phoney one. To find out his real email address, click 'File' button on your email program. Then, when a window opens, click on 'Properties.' This will open a window with two tabs - General and Detail.

The 'General' tab will show you message source and display email address of sender. But 'Detail' tab will give you more details like IP address and email address of sender.

Once you have email address of spammer, add it to your 'Black List' in your email program. This is somewhat of a tedious process I know. It will innitially take some time to black list email addresses of every spammer. But, believe me, it will surely be worth your trouble on long run.

The above tips, if followed, will greatly reduce spam you receive and save you a lot of annoyance, aggravation, frustration and time.

One more point worth mentioning is saying "To reduce spam, do not be a spammer."

Here is a problem looking for a solution. Research has found that around 1 in 5 optin emails still get filtered out by nanny state ISP's who think adults shouldn't think for themselves about what they want to read.

How does this affect you if you have an optin database of 500 folks who really want to read your stuff?

Statistically 100 will never see your message. Frightening when you figure what it cost to get those names in first place?

You have a monthly email newsletter which goes out to your whole database. But you are worried that some of your clients don't get it, because of spam filters on their ISP. Most folks don't know what a whitelist is, or how to set it up.

So...

Your database is 500, and you really treasure bond you have with your prospects and clients. They like you too.

When email goes out, an SMS goes out too. "Hi Frank, I just sent your copy by email of Silver Bullet e-newsletter. If you don't have it please call so we can fix your spam filter - Rick"

Hard cost for 500 SMS messages? $67.50

It's peanuts for marketing that makes sure folks actually read at least ONE of your marketing pieces i.e. SMS message.

Do you see power this can give you?

How often do you have a special deal for selected clients? Need to fill up numbers because you're short at a function?

There are heaps of other applications for SMS and email combined.

If you take free trip at Murgent.com.au please tell them that I sent you. And yeah if you become a paying client, I get a bit of cash too. So what, you've now got a tool that gives you a very large edge which absolutley no-one knows about.

Yet...

Life's short, so make it fun and profitable.

Rick Rakauskas