Whether you’re a seasoned professional looking for a refresher course, or you’re new to internet and email and want to start off right, here are some easy steps to follow to reduce amount of spam you receive.

Don’t choose an obvious email address. Spammers will generate lists of email addresses based on common names. A common list would be something like: nick@yahoo.com, nick1@yahoo.com, nick2@yahoo.com, etc. If you create an email account with less obvious combinations of your name plus some numbers, chances are better that you won’t find your way onto one of these lists.

Treat your personal email address with care. Only give out your personal email address to close friends and family who you trust. Give your direct business email only to clients and other contacts you trust to only use your address for legitimate business purposes.

Use different accounts for different functions. Create different aliases with your business’s domain name or create a few free accounts from free email servers like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Excite, etc. Use one account that you don’t care about for posting to forums or discussion groups. Use another to subscribe to newsletters and newsgroups. When any of these addresses starts to get spammed too heavily, simply delete account and switch to a different one.

Er, wrong! So, you have this fantastic advertisment, and you have to send it out to every nut with a PC. Yep, well you can do that, but I’d seriously reconsider that action. For starters this campaign will be untargeted, and most will hit delete button as they didn’t request it in first place – and you aren’t going to make any money by annoying anyone.

You really have to be careful when sending out those mails, because one mistake, one tiny little error with your etiquette, and bye bye to any first contact and chance of doing business. You see an inbox is a very personal thing, most keep only 1 box, and this is for both their business correspondence and personal mail. They should get a separate box for spam type stuff – then use spam address in those silly, naff places in net – but they DON’T.

Just place yourself in their shoes for one moment, your sitting there, and suddenly ding dong!!!!! You have 2 of same email arrive, selling some sexual product you no way on earth asked for, so you delete it and hope it never comes back, but it does.

It’s irritating right. You could reply, but by replying you are giving them your address, then again it may have just been a simple send error by them – so you don’t unsubscribe after all. I mean what’s harm, it’s only 2 emails okay……

Now multiply that by 20 every week. 40 spam emails every week (and that’s nothing!) that you spend time deleting, blocking and unsubscribing from. Phew!

So what’s answer, increase anti spam laws, go to trouble of changing that email address again etc. I don’t think there is one, net is too big to control something like this. It’s a case of put up with it, and block what you can coming through.