Firstly it would be unfair not to clear up the most common misconception regarding spam. Spam did not start arriving in your email inbox because you or someone within your household visited and/or registered your email address on some less than wholesome website (although if you did register with one it probably did). Here is two very simple ways the spammers gain your inbox address.

• Dictionary Attack - Simply all they do is pick lots of common alphanumeric patterns and with a simple click of a button send thousands if not millions of emails by the law of averages they will get lots of valid email addresses.
• Email list broker - who compiles it by "harvesting" addresses from the Internet. If your email address appears in a newsgroup posting, on a website, in a chat room, or in an online service's membership directory, it may find its way onto these lists. The marketer then uses special software that can send hundreds of thousands - even millions - of email messages to the addresses at the click of a mouse.

what steps can you take to reduce spam emails?

• Never Reply or Unsubscribe to a spam email - We all know they are irritating and sometimes after a bad day you want to send them a piece of your mind in a rather profound manner or you think the spammer has been helpful with the little click here to unsubscribe link. Well they haven't all you will do by replying to them in any way is send a big message to them that reads in the spammers mind. "WE HAVE PICKED A LIVE EMAIL ADDRESS THAT CAN BE ADDED TO OUR ACTIVE LIST". Therefore it is best to just do exactly the same thing as you do with junk mail through your letterbox put it in the bin.
• Use anti-spam software - There is lots of software from companies who specialise in compiling list of spammers and producing blacklists to block spammer's emails from reaching your inbox. A quick search on google with the following search "anti-spam software" with give you thousands of pages of results to help find a solution to suit your needs. One small thing to be careful of is some of this software can be very ruthless in what it blocks so monitor its results to confirm valid email is not been added to the junk mail folder and/or blocked.
• Check the privacy policy when you submit your address to a website - See if it allows the company to sell your address. You may want to opt out of this provision, if possible, or not submit your address at all to websites that won't protect it.
• Read and understand any form on a website that asks for your details - Many websites have a small check box in their forms that is often overlooked namely: receiving special offer emails from their "partners". so be careful to confirm that this box is de-selected (unchecked).
• Try not to display your email address in public - this will help reduce the risk of the email list broker knowing your address. Tthese companies use email harvesting robots to crawl through the internet for websites, chatrooms, newsgroup postings, online directories, etc to look for any email address to add to their lists.
• Use two email addresses - Related closely to above. Have a separate email address for use on posting on public forums, newsgroups etc, and have a separate email address for personal use. This won't stop the spammer knowing your public address but will certainly reduce the bulk arriving in your personal email address inbox.
• Use email address masking code on your websites - If you have a website and wish to display your email address on it use a simple script which displays the email address in a format that the email harvesting robots cant read (if they cant read it they cant collect it and add it to their lists). These scripts are readily available on the internet.
• Report the Spammer - All emails contain the original address in the header of the email (although spammers have been known to modify this). But ISP don't like the spammers either so if they are being used or implicated in sending spam emails from their servers they have the resources and ability to either remove the spammer from using their services and/or liaise with government law enforcement agencies to take further action if required. After all they want to protect their genuine customers and more importantly they don't want to gain bad reputation and thus loose customers and ultimately money. Most ISP's have a dedicated abuse team normally located at one of the following email addresses abuse@isp-name.com or webmaster@isp-name.com.
• If all else fails - Sometimes no matter how hard you try an email address just gets too overloaded with spam you wish to abandon it. But then you are faced with having to tell everyone your new email address and almost inevitably there will be a few people you will forget to notify. A simple of way of avoiding this would be keep the address active but simply use either an autoresponder or "out of office/ on vacation notification" to the email address which replies to all emails sent to that particular email address with a simple reply message of "this address is no longer used please resend email to ... " but a simple trick is instead of putting yournewaddress@myisp.com type it as "your new address AT myisp dot com" simple enough for a human to read but spammers will only read the email address in the sent from box and wont recognise there is an email address contained within your text.

we hope the list of ideas above helped you combat and reduce the amount of spam in your inbox if you have any comments on the above or wish to add further tips you feel would help combat the menace of spam emails please feel free to contact us as we welcome your help and feedback.

Our final and most important word on reducing spam. If the entire world stopped buying from these Spammers then they would have no reason to send the messages in the first place. If a spammer sends out 10 Million unwanted emails and just one person buys something from them then it was successful!