Keeping Your Email Account Safe

In this article, we’ll focus on how to keep our email accounts safe and avoid spam. Take a look at the following tips for keeping your email account safe.

When you sign up for something online, you should be careful while checking checkboxes and must not check checkboxes for additional offers, or you will receive email from partners of the site you signed up at. It is advisable to use several different email accounts to fight spam.

Create a few free email accounts, direct them to your main account, and use those email addresses to sign up for something online. If an account is spammed, disable or abandon it. 

One word of caution: Never use your primary email address to sign up for anything.

At the very least, a user should use three accounts: one for business, one for personal stuff, and another for online shopping.

There are many free email providers available, such as Google Gmail, Hotmail/MSN/Outlook, Yahoo, AOL.

If you plan to use a free email account as your main account, we recommend using Gmail. Google Mail is arguably the most productive well, with highly efficient spam filters, loads of disk space for messages, and Google with third-party plug-ins to increase productivity.

There are also expendable email address services that have more selective disabling features than regular free email providers. Having your own domain registered might include 50 to 100 email addresses as part of your hosting package. You can use these addresses for a newsletter or shopping sign-ups and redirect each account to a main account.

Whatever you may go about doing, never publish your main email address anywhere online. You can use other free email accounts, which can be dropped when necessary. Use a CAPTCHA image-based code to separate spambots from human visitors. Encode your email address like me*AT#hotmail#DOT*COM so that humans can easily read them.

Few of the ISPs add junk mail header status information to messages passing through their mail servers. If the email client is suitable, you can write a “filter rule” to ditch any message whose header includes “X-Spam-Status: Yes”. The disadvantage is that there could be false positives on spam, needing you to check the spam folder on a weekly basis.

You can also write your own command line email filters in a scripting language like Perl or Python, both of which have superior regex pattern-matching abilities. Write a program to grab your email (copies) off POP or IMAP email servers. Build a frequency table for the keywords by saving the IPAddress information for each message. If the data is saved for long-term profiling, keep the spam information in a separate database. If some words in the message raise flags, compare their frequency counts against other words. This step should be manual until you build up long-term profiles. If it’s spam, delete the original copy of your mail server. An Operating System like Linux gives you the facility to integrate custom filters into your email client.