Are you sick of spam relentlessly spewing into your emailbox? So was I, until I learned how to knock it out, or at least slow it down, with my one-two punch. Do both of these things, neither of which will cost you a penny, and enjoy a distinct decrease in
amount of garbage in your inbox. Here we go:
#1 Mail Washing
First, hit spam with Mailwasher, available free at www.mailwasher.net. This easy to set up little program lets you preview email before downloading it. You see all usual details - sender, subject, size - but with one big difference: you can decide BEFORE downloading if you want it.
You get, I'm sure, many emails that you wouldn't have downloaded if only you'd known what was in them. That's just one thing Mailwasher can do for you. Its real power is in its ability to 'bounce' unwanted messages (spam) right back to person who sent it, marked 'message undeliverable.'
To spammer it looks as if your e-mail address is no longer active, and hopefully, next time they 'clean' their list, your email address will fall off. But even if it doesn't, Mailwasher adds spammer's address to a blacklist. The next time they spam you, it's already marked for deletion. (You can always unmark it.)
When you're finished 'washing' your mail of spam and unwanted downloads, click 'process mail' and whatever messages are left will be downloaded as usual when you log on through your e- mail program, which you can do directly from MailWasher.
I have over 20 email addresses, so you can imagine flood of spam that poured in my mailbox every day. Now I run them all through Mailwasher first, and it has made a huge difference.
To further reduce spam, Mailwasher has another trick that your regular email program doesn't. It learns. There are all kinds of settings, filters, sorts and alerts. The more you use it, more it learns what you do and don't want to see. It does lots of stuff that I haven't even tried yet. But for what I need - quick and dirty spam elimination - it does great.
Best of all, it's free to try. If you like it, author asks that you pay him whatever you think is fair. How much you pay him is up to you, but funds go to future development of product. Considering how useful this program is, I think that's a very worthy cause. #2: Email Encoding
Once you've got Mailwasher going, you're on your way to getting off spam lists. To stay off, don't skip this second step!
One of ways that spammers get your email address is through harvesting programs that crawl net snatching email addresses off of websites, message boards, newsgroups. Anywhere they can find something that looks like an email address, they grab it. And way that they know it's an email address is by looking for 'mailto' or '@' symbol.
There are programs available - also free - that will encode your email address for you. This converts your ASCII email address into its equivalent decimal entity. For example, letter "a" equates to: "a" (without quotes), letter "b" equates to: "b", and so forth.
