Email Spam is a big problem and can be a huge hindrance to people who use email. Imagine logging in to check your email and having to look through 50 spam emails to realize you have 2 genuine emails there for you.

There are things you can do to help reduce the amount of spam you get and to make life a bit easier with the spam you receive.

So, you are receiving spam, here is what to do!

The best thing to do with spam is delete it, don't open it, read it or open any attachments that may be contained with in it! Allot of spam is very easy to spot without you having to read the email, you will be able to tell if something is spam in many cases based on what the subject is and also who it is being sent from.

If you do read the spam then do not reply to it. Also, if it contains a "click here to remove yourself from our email list" or something similar then also do not click or reply to this. In many cases spammers use this as a way to gather information about an email address that is in use, so if you do reply to it then you will be showing them that they are infact spamming a genuine in use email address which is what they want!

If you read some spam then do not buy/sign up/use whatever it is that they are promoting. The reason people spam is for money and they need people to respond or buy things from using the email spam they have sent out. If you do buy or click on the link that they contain in the spam email then you are going to help fund their spamming. Hit spammers in the pocket by not funding their spam, this is one of the best ways to stop spammers if they are not earning then there is no point them spamming!

You may receive "chain letter" emails form time to time from people you know that ask you to forward the email onto other people. Do not do this as it has been know for spammers to start off these or use them once they have been sent to hundreds of people. It is quite easy for an email like this to have hundreds of email addresses listed (including yours) that won't take a spammer long to extract all the email addresses they want and use them to spam you.

Also, spammers don't just spam you themselves, they can also sell on your email address to other spammers. So if you think on that by ignoring any of the actions above you may not consider to be that bad, but if you bear in mind then that the spammer who has your email address could well sell it on to lots of other spammers so just be very vigilant!

Another tool that spammers use are called "email harvesters". What an email harvester is is a piece of software that a spammer can set to crawl through websites and message boards and route out email addresses and store them. This requires very little work on the spammers part as it is an automated tool that they can set to do the "work" for them.

To help protect your email address from being collected in this way be very careful about where you post your email address. Some message boards and forums are protected so only users who are registered are able to read messages and posts left on it, others are not and anyone is able to access and read them.

If you want to leave your email address then don't just stick it straight down as me@myemail.com. You can do a could of things to help protect your email address, such as creating an image file of your email address and whenever you want to leave it you can link the image into you post, that way the email harvester will see this as an image file and not your email address.

Another way to make it harder for a spammer to try and just collect your email address is the way you put it down. For example below are a couple of different ways to put your email address down.

me @ myemail .com (tell people to remove the spaces)
me (@) myemail.com (tell people to remove the brackets and spaces)
me at myemail.com (tell people to change the "at" for an @ and remove the spaces)