There are many ways to reduce spam, and often they are similar only on the surface, with technical details that are disparate but achieve equivalent results. Combining the best of these techniques achieves the best results, but with the myriad ways spammers can craft their spam, our efforts must change and adapt just as the spammers do. The basics of reducing spam are constants, though. Let's look at the top five.
5. Don't List Your E-mail Address Everywhere
If you list e-mail addresses on your Web sites as mailto links, spammers can search the web scanning for those addresses and harvest them. There are ways to encode and obfuscate e-mail links so that spambots cannot harvest them. Most Web developers will know how to do this and can help you with it.
4. Use Multiple Levels of Spam Protection
Relying on just one type of spam prevention won't do the job these days. Spam blocking at your firewall, on your e-mail server, and at your mail client as well may seem like overkill, but working together you can almost eliminate spam reaching your inbox. Now with time some spam may get through, but with these layers of prevention working together you will never see much.
3. Use Your Spam Filters
There are excellent spam filters available for e-mail clients and e-mail servers, and they can often work together to greatly reduce spam. But you must use them in order for them to improve, much like exercise makes you stronger. Bayesian filters really need these updates. Be sure to mark spam as such, and configure your e-mail client to update your mail server with the information that such mails are spam if it is possible.
2. Don't Give Out Your E-mail Address (to Strangers)
This may be harder than it seems. While most reputable businesses these days won't sell your e-mail address to spammers, you can't be too cautious about giving it out. Without reading a clear statement that your e-mail address will never be sold or shared, you shouldn't fill it in on forms online or even on paper, unless it is absolutely required.
1. Don't Respond to Spam E-mails--Ever!
There may be some verbiage at the bottom of an e-mail suggesting that if you click on a link there or reply that you will be removed from the spammer's list. Don't do it! Ever! Once a spammer knows your e-mail address is valid, they will send tons of spam your way, and also put that address on a list of known good e-mail addresses to sell and share.
The best place to start is with a good spam filter if there is not already one on your e-mail client or server. There almost has to be one on your e-mail server if you use a major Web mail service. What you can do there to improve things is to mark spam messages as spam, rather than just deleting them. This updates the filter on the server and is a very big help in catching future spam.