The Australian Government SPAM Act 2003, states all “Commercial electronic messages must contain a functional unsubscribe facility”. However, sometimes clicking the unsubscribe link validates your email address as “live” to the message sender. Rather than reducing SPAM, this may result in receiving more SPAM!
Here are five simple tips for reducing SPAM:
1. Many email applications have a Junk Email feature that will seek out messages that have key text such as Free or Rolex or Make Money and so on, and automatically send them to a Junk Email folder for you to deal with.
2. Some email applications have rules that enable you to specify a subject or key word (as above) and then send the mail straight to the deleted items or trash bin on arrival.
3. Check to see if your Internet Security or Virus Checking software has an inbuilt spam filter. These days there are various spam and Ad-Ware filtering software available to help reduce spam, just type in “Spam Filter” in a search engine such as Google and a long list will be found.
4. Be careful who you provide your email address to, i.e. when signing up for a mailing list, be sure you are happy to receive information from that site and check their privacy and whether they provide the ability to unsubscribe.
5. Talk to other people about how they go about reducing SPAM and what technologies they use.
Finally, a question I am often asked by soloists is what do to with unwanted messages which are sent to their domain even though they have not set up the address. Typical examples are sales@yourdomain.com or info@yourdomain.com
The answer? Contact your Domain host. When a soloist’s domain name is “hosted” by a company, they assume you will have an inquiry/sales type address as well as your own personal address. In order to ensure no mail is missed if people don’t know your personal address, the domain host company will often redirect anything with @yourdomain to you so you don’t miss out. However you ought to be able to reverse this. Give them a call to find out what they can do.
“ Be careful who you provide your email address to. ”
Donna Hanson specialises in computer and technology related education for business and corporate users. Her company provides customised training and resources to help users understand and increase their knowledge of computer related technology.
