SPAM, or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail), does not endeared itself to anyone.

The absolute way of getting no spam is to have no mailbox at all! The next best thing is to not have your address lying around the internet. Don’t give out your address just to anyone, or any website, without seeing they have a “privacy policy”. This should say they will not pass your address to another peoples. This is the very basic of spam prevention.

The most popular method spammers use to get at your addresses is to automatically “harvest” them from newsgroups and message boards. So the first rule is, never put in your e-mail address “un-mungled” when using these services.

*mungled?* It’s a term for messing up your e-mail address in a way that fools the spammer’s robot, yet allow actual human person to read what the real address is. Example: instead of [email protected], put it as [email protected]. This will make it useless for the spammer, as they mostly use automatic harvesting and don’t normally look at each address one by one. But the example above is a bit too simplistic. The current trend is to do something like
[email protected] and say “remove bird name” at the end of your message. This leaves no chance for the harvesting robot, as it can’t possibly connects eagle with bird.

*unsubscribe?* This absolutely does not work. When you click “unsubscribe” in a spam, it only notify the spammer that the address is real (and good for them). Click unsubscribe only when you have actually subscribed for the e-mail in the first place, not when the spam came from an unknown source.