How To Virtually Stop Spam From Getting To Your Inbox by:Barbara Bulkin

Are you tired of getting bombarded with e-mail that is of no interest to you

? Do you open up your e-mail software only to find e-mail that contains unsolicited sales offers and promotions? We get hundreds of solicitations a day and very few of them reach our Inbox.

First it's important to understand how your e-mail address is obtained. It may surprise you to know that it's probably from you! Spammers obtain your e-mail address from a variety of sources including your domain name registration record, your posts on the internet, contact information on your website and from your promotional material such as brochures and business cards. Spammers also obtain your e-mail address when you click on the unsubscribe link contained in the spam. Unless you actually subscribed to the newsletter or mailing list you should not use the unsubscribe link. It provides validation to the spammers that your address is valid. It is then sold to others as a valid address. When you do business with a company or organization and subscribe to a mailing list you can also be providing the company with authorization to provide your address to their partners. Before you give out your e-mail address know how it will be used or distributed. You can also contact your !

website hosting company or the registry used to register your domain name and request assistance with privatizing your domain name registration records.

Spam is sent for one reason and only one reason. Recipients buy from spammers and or visit the websites promoted in the spam. If no one ever responded to spam it would not be an issue. The number one thing you can do to battle spam is to never respond to an offer received via email that you did not initiate or request or that comes from a company you are not doing business with. If you do business with a company and they send you an email verify the identity of the sender before you provide any personal or financial information. You can and should call the company instead of responding via email if you suspect a phishing scam.

E-mail is a proven and important method used for conducting business and keeping in touch with friends and families. How then can you take control of our Inbox and not have to sift through all of the unsolicited junk mail throughout the day? We use a software solution with our website hosting account called SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin, part of the Apache project, is included at no additional charge. Check with your website hosting provider to see if this solution is offered. If not consider the benefits of switching to a company that does offer SpamAssassin.

By easily configuring SpamAssassin through the user interface you can regain control of your Inbox and get almost no spam. Configure the software so that only email from senders in your whitelist gets through. Any other email is moved to a junk mail folder where you review the contents and delete the junk as needed. This is accomplished by changing the Spam Filtering Mode to Strict. You have the option of having the junk email deleted automatically if the sender is not in your whitelist but with that option you do risk loosing email that you prefer to receive. The whitelist is a file that contains the email address of senders that you elect to receive email from. That list can be updated as often as necessary.

You can use wildcard designations in your whitelist to help insure that email that you want is received. A wildcard designation means that any email from a specific domain name such as highspeedhostingsolutions.com or amazon.com... will get through. You don't have to add specific addresses when using a wildcard designation. Using a wildcard instead of a full email address will result in some spam being received.

SpamAssassin is a valuable tool in the battle against spam. Are you ready to take back your Inbox? If so this software is one of the first steps in the process.

About the author

Barbara Bulkin is associated with HighSpeedHostingSolutions.com and has been in the website hosting business for over 12 years. SpamAssassin is included and supported with all accounts at no additional charge.

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