How To Protect Yourself From Email Spam

Email spam can bog us down everyday. Just imagine the amount of time it takes people across the global to sort through all the junk email just to get to the more important email addressed to them. There are expensive solutions out there but why pay for a service when you can do it yourself. Here are some steps you can take to protect yourself from email spam.

By creating a secondary email, you can basically have all your junk mail forwarded to this address instead of the email address you actually share with friends and family. A lot of websites require you to sign up for the service they are providing and from time to time they do email you newsletters and may even share your email address to marketing companies that in turn blast you with spam every day. So to avoid all of that I created a secondary email address which I provide during the sign up process of any website. I can also forward those emails to my mail email account if I choose to but it would just clutter up my inbox.

There are plenty of websites out there that offer disposable email accounts which you can use during sign up process on a website. The benefit of disposable emails is that you don't need to do anything other than just check the inbox if you want to for any confirmation emails you may have gotten as a result of you signing up on a website. The benefits of disposable email addresses are that they do the work for you and you don't have to create an account with them. I primarily use Dispostable.com and Mailinator.com. These websites automatically delete the emails after a certain time frame so don't send important emails if you are expecting important emails. Also usually these websites do not provide a way to forward these emails, however downloading the email is an option. 

Many Email providers have a feature called filters. Basically it sorts out the emails for you. Gmail is one of the main email providers out there that does offer this feature for free. The filters are easy to set up and you can decide whether to delete emails from a certain sender upon arrival or mark it as important. With Gmail's filters option you no longer have to sort through your email constantly. Instead the emails now get sorted for you via the filters feature.

If you are a Gmail user you can also take advantage of the + feature. Basically if you think you will get spammed then you can provide your email address like this jobister+junk@gmail.com. Once inside gmail you can setup a filter to parse any emails sent to the mentioned email address to junk folder.

If you are a Hotmail user, you can now setup an alias email address that can be used as a secondary email address. Check Out Lifehacker.com's guide to setting up your Hotmail Alias account.

Email addresses are our mailboxes these days. Just like we don't like to see thousands of flyers of nonsense items in our mailbox neither do we want to see the same in our email inbox. The true best ways to protect oneself from spam is to not sign up on websites that look they were made by a second grader (no offense to 2^nd graders). Be careful when providing your email address and only provide it to websites and people you can trust.