Reduce Your Junk E-mail to Zero in 3 Easy Steps

By
Angie Herrera

Junk email is a serious pain in the you-know-what. You know the kind: Nigerian scams, body part enlargements, how to increase your site's rankings and so on and so forth.

1. Make sure your email is encoded on your website

Obviously, having your email address on your website is important if you want people to get in touch with you. But don't make the mistake of putting it out there all defenseless. Make sure your Content Management System automatically encodes or obfuscates the email address so it's not easily harvested by spambots. If you're unsure how to do that, ask your web designer.

2. Enable anti-spam measures on your website's hosting account

Your web host should provide a few different levels of spam prevention. While some of it is 100% in their control, they should have anti-spam controls available within your control panel. If you don't have anything like SpamAssassin, it's best to ask your host what measures you can take. If they can't give you a good answer, switch web hosts.

3. Set up your email program to identify junk and toss it

This step varies depending on the email program you use, but any email program worth its weight will have ways for it to identify junk email and then either toss it into a specified folder or delete it altogether (so you don't have to deal with it). Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook both provide these things, as do other popular ones (including Gmail, Yahoo! and other web-based ones).

Will these tips work?

Your mileage may vary, as they say, but using these 3 tips have kept my inbox virtually spam-free.