If you are buried in SPAM then you're not alone. It's been suggested that as much as 50% to 75% of the e-mail traffic on any given day is SPAM. Reading through SPAM is a waste of your time and it subjects you to potential viruses, trojan horses, and sexual material which can be quite offensive. Here are some tips on how to win the SPAM war:

1. Use a throwaway email address when posting to public news groups and chat rooms and for your Yahoo or MS Messenger Chat accounts. You can get free email addresses at Yahoo, HotMail and other places. Use your personal ISP-provided email address only to communicate with trusted sources. If you are an AOL user then set up an additional email account to use for public posting purposes. When your free or spare email account starts getting abused just close it and open another.

2. Take the time to set up different email addresses for different purposes. Have one for business communications, another for personal and another one for shopping online. That way you can avoid the risk of exposing one e-mail address to all of your contacts.

3. If you own your own web site then the chances are that your hosting account comes with the ability to create new e-mail addresses on the fly. These are addresses that will automatically forward to your main address. If you have that capability then use a unique address for each web site or mailing list that you choose to join. For example, if your site name is abc.com and you decide to join the mailing list located at xyz.com, you would join using the address xyz@abc.com. If you start getting SPAM to this address then you know that the people who run xyz.com are responsible. You can complain to them and their ISP and you can easily delete that email address.

4. Don't list your email address on your own web site in plain html or as a link to a contact form. Spammers use automated robots to capture these addresses and add them to SPAM databases. Instead use an email cloaking script whenever you need to show your email address. You can search at Google.com using the phrase "email cloaking" and come up with a lot of options. Just pick the one that works best for your particular needs.

5. Do not buy anything from a company that sends you SPAM. Not only might the company or offer be a scam but you are jumping right into the fire by letting spammers know that your email address is active and that you buy from spammers. Your address will be sold to thousands of other spammers.

6. Never reply to a spammer or click the "remove my address" link. That only lets them know that your address is good.

7. If your email service or email client comes with SPAM filters use them.

8. You might want to think about subscribing to a SPAM prevention service. Search on Google.com for "SPAM prevention service" and review your options.

Following these simple tips could cut your SPAM down by as much as 90%. Wouldn't that be great!

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