Still, there are some precautions you can take from stopping spammers from learning of your email.

1. Protect your Email Address

Spammers need genuine, active email addresses to ply their trade. They use tools to automatically harvest email addresses from the internet, targeting addresses listed on websites, forum postings, mailing lists, and other sites.

They compile lists of email addresses and trade these amongst other spammers. It helps if you can resist advertising your email address on the internet to avoid being added to one of these lists.

It also helps to have a secondary email account for the occasions when you do participate in an online forum, or when signing up to newsletters and/ or competitions.

A second, less-important email address will help protect your main address and spare it from being harvested.

Protecting your email address will help reduce spam, but it’s worth remembering that spam bots also spew out lots of randomly addressed emails in the hopes of reaching a valid email account. Even new and unpublicised addresses can still get junk.

3. Setup Google reCAPTCHA V3

Google has launched reCAPTCHA v3 to prevent spam bots without any user interaction.

It allows website owners to weed out harmful traffic generated by bots without even requiring visitors to prove they’re human.

The change also makes it easier for website visitors to log into their favorite sites without the wasted time and frustration of having to solve a puzzle to prove they’re a real human each time.

Recaptcha v3 now generates a score so website owners can determine if their traffic originated from bots. Website owners can generate scripts to perform automated actions based on the traffic score.

For instance, if Recaptcha v3 returns a low score, a website owner can use a script to require two-factor authentication or email verification as a requirement for their sites.

How to Setup Google reCAPTCHA V3 to your site!

If you need help in integrating Google reCAPTCHA V3 to your website(s) reach out to us.

4. Train your Email Filter

Filtering is the most readily accessible anti-spam measure, available from many products and services. Filters help but they usually let some spam emails get through and, occasionally they catch some genuine messages too.

When you find spam in your inbox, don’t just delete it. Select it, and tell your mail client that this particular message is spam. How you do this depends on your client.

For instance, if you’re using Gmail’s website, click the Report spam button in the toolbar (the icon looks like an exclamation point inside a stop sign).

You also need to train the email client about your false positives. Once a day, go through your spm folder looking for messages that don’t belong there. When you find one, select it and tell the client that it made a mistake. In Gmail, you click the Not spam button.

If your mail client is halfway decent, it will learn from these mistakes…but only if you train it.

5. Anti-Spam Software

Anti-spam features may be built into the software you already use to check your email. Mac OS X’s Mail program can be trained to work out what you regard as spam, as can Mozilla Thunderbird (http://mozilla.com/thunderbird).

These employ a filtering technique that recognises the kinds of messages users flag as junk.

Some antivirus and general security suite products also contain anti-spam features. If you have already shelled out for an all-in-one product, check the documentation to see whether there are anti-spam settings that need to be activated.

If your current software doesn’t have it, there are dedicated anti-spam products available. There are some freebie software programs here:

• Mailwasher – It works with Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and every other email program.
• Cactus Spam Filter – Only compatible with Windows computers
• Spam Bully – Only compatible with Windows computers

6. Black and White Lists

Some anti-spam programs may also make use of a black list, but it’s worth noting that at this level they may not be as effective, since they can’t keep up with spammers who register and dump domains frequently. Instead, software-based black lists are possibly better left for blocking annoying newsletters.

On the other hand, a white list can work quite well for individual email users. It’s a list of all those who are authorised or approved to send email to you. A white list can help stop genuine messages from being incorrectly filtered as spam.

7. Never Respond to Spam

If you recognize something as spam before you open it, don’t open it. If you open it and then realize it’s spam, close it. Do not click a link or a button, or download a file, from a message that you even remotely suspect is spam.

If you opened a spam because it appeared to be coming from a friend or co-worker, contact them immediately and let them know that their account has been compromised.

8. Change your Email Address

This is a very drastic option, but if you’ve responded to spam in the past or haven’t hidden your address, and are therefore overloaded with spam, it may be your best option.

Of course you’ll have to inform your legitimate contacts about the change, and you’ll probably have to keep both addresses for a few months. But once you can get rid of the old address, your spam count should plummet.