How to avoid getting spam and junk email

Spam is a major problem in this world, occupying most email transactions and tormenting many Internet users.

Set up a secondary email account

This is the most important step. In many cases you are required to supply an email address to do thing on the Internet. Setting up a spare junk email account, is a good idea. This way you can use this email address when you need to confirm a registration, and not worry about additional crap later.

• Sign up for a free email account
  • yahoo mail: http://www.yahoo.com
  • Gmail: http://gmail.google.com
  • etc.
• remember the account name and password as you may need to check it on occasion for email confirmations.
• Use this email address for any site or service that you don't trust
  • Remember that most sites offering free services will probably send you spam or sell your address
• When in doubt use your secondary account

Don't post your email publicly

• If your email address is shown on any website, a spammer will get you address and spam you to death
  • Spammers have scripts, aka bots, that search the entire web for email addresses, and they do it well

Techniques for posting your address (bot-proof)

Bad Techniques

• normal: name@address.com
• all text: name (at) address (dot) com
  • This is commonly used so spammers have or will figure it out

Good techniques

• Web-Forms
  • make sure you email address is not in the html code for the form
  • have your email address hidden in the cgi, php, or perl script.
• Email address in an image file

  

  • Eventually spammers will figure this out so you may have to be creative

From HowTo Wiki, a Wikia wiki.