As the title suggests, I am going to embark on a series of articles to reduce the amount of spam that you have to deal with on a daily basis. This issue is not going away any time soon, so it is up to us to mitigate the effect that it has on our daily interaction with our computers. Perhaps by working on eliminating it from our personal lives, we can have an effect on cutting it down and save some of that bandwidth for more important communications.

First, begin with changing how you use your e-mail address. Get yourself at least 3 different types of e-mail addresses, a Primary, Backup and a Disposable one. Your primary e-mail address is the one you will use with the world you interact with, the one on your business card and the one your family and friends will use most of the time. I will get back to discussing your backup address in a moment, but also get yourself a disposable e-mail address. This is usually a free web based e-mail address that you can cancel at any time and not lose a thing, no messages, no important notices etc. As far as a backup is concerned, some of you may not be able to do this, but if you can get another e-mail address from a different ISP that you can use if for some reason your primary is down. This will enable you to communicate business and personal information in a pinch. Many ISP’s have lower rates for obtaining just an e-mail address without all of the other services that they provide.

Your primary e-mail address is the one that will get the most spam, but you can institute some measures that will reduce the number. Here again, some of you may not be able to get the best possible address, which would be one using your domain name. Many of us with domain names sometimes forget that we tend to be the minority rather than the majority, so many of you will be using the e-mail that you opened your account with. You can still fight back. Make sure the name you use is not made up of common words like names, or dictionary searchable. This is time consuming but will save you a lot of grief in the future. String words together or make up words, but don’t use random letters. When you use random letters you increase the chances that your address will be blocked by spam blockers, not the result you are looking for.

Many of us think that by using our name and putting a few numbers behind it that we have been oh so very clever. Sorry, not so clever because if we thought of it guess who else did? Spammers do not pay by the message and they can compile random lists that have so many combinations that you could not begin to think of all of them, so think outside the box. For instance, while I am writing this e-mail I am looking out the window at a field, so I could use something like inmyfield@domainname.com or bunnyhoppingby@domainname.com. That is just an example of the type of names you can try to come up with. You can begin to narrow things down to make it more personal to your particular lifestyle or incorporating something that people know about you.

In the next article in this series I will complete the discussion regarding your Primary e-mail address and begin to discuss the Disposable e-mail address. I believe that when this series is done we will all reduce the spam in our mailbox and perhaps begin to make a dent in electronic junk mail.