Secure email address against spam using email forw...

Email spam is a concern for most these days. It might not take long before you receive spam in your fresh active email account.



A spam email is an email received which you did not ask for. Most of the time, it would be from unknown source. It may even have a fake sender name to make you open it. Spam is sent for various reasons like cheap publicity, frauds and even works as pollinators for computer viruses.

Listed are some precautions for protection against spam.

• Do not give your email ID to anyone!
  
  Then ... how to use it? The key is to classify contacts and then use appropriate forwarding mechanisms. A forwarding mechanism allows any email sent to some other address to be automatically received at your email address.
  
  
• For temporary addresses, check spamgourmet.com It offers temporary email forwarding addresses of form 'tempname.youraccount at spamgourmet.com' where tempname is any arbitrary word and youraccount is your spamgourmet account name. This address would expire after some number of emails and that would automatically stop too many emails coming from that sender. For example, this can be used for site registrations where you do not expect more than a couple of emails for registration.
  
  
• Social networking sites allow hiding email address and access control. This way only friends can write to you without giving away actual address.
  
  
• Use Email service providers that allow email forwarding, e.g, gmail. Aggregate mails from these accounts into another account, which is not given even to trusted parties. Thus, if one of your addresses are compromised, it would not effect others.
  
  
• Extended email address are provided by some email providers. If your address is a@b.c, a+anything@b.c also delivers mail to a@b.c, but with added advantage that a+anything@b.c can be filtered out if it is subjected to spam.
  
  

Why not share email address with friends? Because they might unknowingly pass your email address to spammers. It works like this: user1 forwards a message to user2 and user3. He uses To: and CC: field to address them. This way, now user2 and user3 have each other's addresses, but they never intended to do so. Now this message is forwarded many time and ends up either in a spammer's hand with all the email addresses or is posted on some site ready for spammer to crawl.



The moral of this story is, when you forward messages to many email addresses, always use BCC field, not TO or CC. use your address in TO if the software forces to write some address there. Unless your friends follow this, your email address is in risk of getting into hands of anyone.



The indirect method of contacts such as social networks has added benefit, that your changes in email address are transparent to your friends. Thus, if your email address is compromised by mistake of someone you share address with or you want to check out new cool email service, you can change the email address without involving people who do not share it directly with you, e.g. users of online groups and social networking sites.



These tips can take little time to practice, but provides good defense against spam.