Can you believe that approximately 85% of all email is SPAM? Well, if you’ve come to this page, then you probably already know that.
There are a ton of ways to reduce / eliminate spam, but this is what has worked best for me and is something that is pretty easy to do.
Process
Setup Two Email Accounts:
The first thing you want to do is setup two email accounts, a “Personal” address, and a “Disposable” address. Here is what you use them for:
- PERSONAL: This is the email address you give to family and friends ONLY! You never signup for anything using this email, and never post this address on any forums or websites.
- DISPOSABLE: Of course you also want to sign up for things like rebates, forums, notifications, accounts, etc. etc. etc. The problem is, you never know which of these will let your email address “slip” or just plain out sell your information.
Hopefully, if you are careful, you’ll never get SPAM into your Personal account and you can keep it forever without worry. But, your Disposable account is completely different… it isn’t a question of IF, but WHEN you will start getting SPAM into this email account.
Here’s what I did. About two years ago I started this process. I had my personal account, rob@domain.com, and my disposable account, rtl@domain.com. I used the disposable account for all my signups, registrations, etc. Sure enough, after about 8 months the account was getting close to the 80% SPAM mark. It was time to go to action, so here is what I did:
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- First I deleted all SPAM email from Outlook Express (my mail client).
- Next I did a search in Outlook Express for all email sent to the disposable account rtl@domain.com (this showed me all the Non-SPAM email that was sent to this account.
- Setup a new disposable account, rtl2@domain.com
- Visited the institutions (ones I was still interested in receiving email from) and changed my contact email to rtl2@domain.com
- Left the first account (rtl@domain.com) open for about a month to make sure I was no longer getting any important emails to that account.
- Deleted the first disposable account.
- Enjoyed my new SPAM-FREE email accounts!
- Repeat process when SPAM overwhelms your inbox
NOTE1:
I’d suggest staying away from “free” email accounts. I can’t prove this, but I suspect that many of them actually contribute to your SPAM (they need to make money somewhere). If you are interested in your own domain name and hosting / email accounts, I can get you a 50% discount on any package at this host (where I host my sites) click here.
NOTE2:
When you first start out you may not be getting any SPAM at all, so instead of setting up a whole separate disposable account, simply setup an email forwarder. Your email will forward from your disposable address to your personal address. When you start to get a bunch of SPAM into your disposable address then I’d suggest deleting the forwarder and creating an actual account.
NOTE3:
Unfortunately I have some email accounts that I just can’t delete. Since I’m stuck with these accounts I needed a program for filtering out my email. I tried a few different approaches and then I read in a forum that someone was getting 95% efficiency in a SPAM filter. This is how I discovered Popfile, the best SPAM filter I’ve ever used. Below is a screenshot of my spam statistics. Most important, note that I’m still getting 87% SPAM but the filter is 99.55% accurate!
