No one likes SPAM... Even the people who sell online viagra don’t like it. The people who promise you $500 per hour jobs don’t like to see their own email in their own inboxes. But this disease is so pervasive that it is hard to ignore.

According to Pingdom- Internet 2010 in numbers out of 107 Trillion emails sent last year, almost 90% of them were SPAM.

Too put it for in words: That is a LOT of SPAM.

What We Can Do About It

There are quite a few conventional methods of detecting SPAM. Some our to lenient i.e. they miss too much and some our too strict i.e. they end up marking legit emails as junk (which I think is more of a sin!)

Proactive Approach

The best solution from SPAM is prevention instead of protection. Instead of putting up SPAM filters it is better to be careful of whom you give your email address to. Having at least two email address might not be bad idea: one for personal and official purposes and other one dedicated just to the spammers. I like to call it my SPAM absorber email address!

Golden Rules of SPAM Prevention

1. •Always use the SPAM email address on all social websites (Facebook, Tweeter etc.)
   

2. •Don’t ever use your main email address on any sort of online discussion forums
   

3. •If you run a website(blog or something...) never write your email address there, if you want to publish your email address for contacting purposes try a flash guestbook (since HTML guesbooks  are very vulnerable to SPAM themselves)
   

4. •If you don’t like the idea of having flash guestbook or comment sections you also have option of turning your email address into a photograph and post the photograph instead of writing down your email on your website in text format: make a screen shot of the email on your word

   processing software and post the email address as a photograph since emails are snatched by so called webcrawlers off the web and they are blind to any photographs... if a legit user wants to write you an email she could simply type it down from your website, copy-paste won’t work since the email address is not really typed in on your website (You might want to keep your email address short-term-memory friendly since user can’t use copy-paste)
   

5. •If you are getting newsletter emails from a known company (like BestBuy, Otto etc.) you can opt out of such emails by clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link in the newsletter, this link is usually made as small as possible so you might need to put on your reading glasses for that
   

6. •Some horrible spammers pass along(sell) your email address to another company if you legally bar them from sending you any emails (by opting out of a newsletter you are legally preventing them from sending you any more emails)
   

7. •Everything else fails in this list you can always try bouncing emails- Bouncing emails is a way of telling the sender of the email that email address doesn’t exist, this works best on email campaigners with a real email address, usually they have software deleting email addresses that do not exist, bouncing works only from email clients like Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook- if you are still using webmail then you should try something from this century soon!
   

8. •If the email address that sends you the most email is not a real email address- for example noreplay@apple.com or dummy@dummy.com- bouncing emails back is not going to work, so in this case you can try blocking specific email addresses