I. Organize your eMail accounts

This is the most difficult part since it requires some serious thought and discipline. Set up different accounts for different purposes. Use one for friends and family and never post it online. Try to do the same for work. Use other accounts for shopping online, social networks, chat friends, message boards etc. It’s tedious at first, but if you’re using Pop mail, it’s easy to manage multiple accounts.

When creating your eMail address be creative, don’t use words found in a dictionary, combine with numbers or letters. The reason is that most spam doesn’t reach your inbox because your address was extracted from a dubious source. Rather you are being spammed randomly by so-called dictionary attacks on your eMail provider.

II. Mask your eMail address

Fortunately, most spam bots are stupid. For example they don’t recognize eMail addresses typed with spaces or displayed in images. There are several excellent tools that may help you to protect your eMail address and keep it spam free:

1. Hide your eMail address in an image.It requires some level of intelligence to copy text from an image.

Tool: Spam Proof eMail Generator

2. Hide your eMail address behind a CAPTCHA.

Again, whoever wants to access your eMail address needs to be smart enough to pass the test.

Tool: MailHide ReCaptcha

3. Hide your eMail address in a contact form.

This will not reveal your eMail address at all.

Tools: Kontactr, ReachBy and Contactify

III. Use temporary or fake information

How many times a week do you sign up for something new online, and how many times will you keep coming back to that service? Temporary eMail addresses are a great solution to avoid sharing your eMail address in the first place. Should you decide to stick with that service, you can still give them your valid address later on. Again, there are numerous sites to consider.

1. Spam Motel.

My personal favorite. You sign up a permanent account with them and create temporary eMail addresses as you need them. Mail is being forwarded to your real address. Once spam finds you, you cancel the address it’s coming through and start over. There is a similar tool called GishPuppy , however the signup form didn’t work for me.

2. Spamgourmet

It’s one of many similar services. It creates a disposable eMail on the spot which automatically expires after having forwarded three messages. You need to sign up with Spamgourmet to use it.

3. MintEmail

Here you can create a temporary address that will expire after four hours or after three months. What’s cool is that the four hour address is automatically created and saved to your clipboard once you enter the page. The page proceeds to constantly check for incoming mail on that address. The concept is awesome. However, while testing my test eMail had not arrived after over one hour. Hopefully a temporary issue.

4. BugMeNot

Step out of the vicious eMail cycle and use disposable login data, including an invalid eMail address.

IV. Filter Spam

Chances are you have an eMail address that is already being spammed but you don’t want to part with it. Depending on how you check your mail you can either manually teach your mail program to better recognize spam or, in case you’re using POP mail or IMAP, you can use a tool that sits between your eMail provider and your inbox to filter incoming eMail.

1. Writing Mail Filters

This article from Spamnation gives excellent directions on how to decrease the amount of spam that reaches your inbox with a step by step guide.

2. Spamihilator

A free Windows tool that works with POP3 and IMAP accounts. Spamihilator claims to identify more than 98% of incoming spam mail. You can help to increase its success rate by customizing the settings, such as adding words to the Spam Words list, enabling the DCC-Filter to recognize unsolicited bulk mail, add your friends’ eMail addresses, and install plugins to further improve the overall performance.

Standard mail programs are recognized automatically (although it can take ages), those that are not supported can be set up manually.

The online documentation for every aspect of the program is very thorough and clear.

V. Use Gmail

Gmail comes with a few nifty features that can make your life a lot easier. First of all the default Gmail spam filter is pretty good. Then you can use a single Gmail account and have multiple eMail addresses with it. Just sort them into different folders to effectively separate spam from real mail. You can track and block spammers by adding cue words to your eMail address when signing up anywhere. Read more in Aibek’s article 1 Awesome Gmail tip You Don’t Know about. Seriously.

How much time do you spend digging through spam and how do you fight it?

(By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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1. Amung.us – Amung.us is a tiny real-time traffic analytics widget for your blog. It tells you (and your readers) how many people are currently on the website, what pages they’re reading, where in the world they’re coming from, and more. See our Amung.us widget below:

2. Conduit – Got a niche focused blog? If so, why not to offer a custom toolbar? Enable your readers to follow-up on latest posts, search your blog, have one click access to related resources/tools and more directly from the toolbar. I am not going to dwell much into it but this is definitely a must-have. It’s really hard to convince someone to get your toolbar but if you can implement it properly it can be a major plus. I am still working on our own, and I am quite sure it will be a big addition to MUO.

3. MoFuse – Take your blog mobile. This free service lets you create mobile version of your website in a matter of minutes. All you need is a working RSS feed. Once created MoFuse can automatically detect and redirect mobile readers to a mobile version. [Demo Video]

4. SiteMeter – Comprehensive real-time website traffic counter and analytics. Follow-up on latest referrals, entry/exit pages, visitor details, visits/pageviews ratio, and a lot more. Check out MakeUseOf’s sitemeter counter here.

5. Google Analytics – Google Analytics will fill-in the parts that you won’t get with Sitemeter. It’s by far the best analytics program out there, and what’s even better is it’s free. It has everything: detailed referral reports, click heat maps, email alerts, individual page performance stats, user bounce rates, campaign tracking, and lots more. See full feature list here.

6. BlogRush / AdGridWork – Both of these networks work as “ad exchange” programs where you can earn free promotion credits in exchange for displaying non-obtrusive relevant network ads on your own website (mostly as widgets). The more traffic your website gets the more credits and referrals you earn. [Demo Video]

7. PubMatic – PubMatic allows bloggers to make maximum off their website’s advertising space by automatically placing highest performing ad units on each page. It scans multiple ad networks (Google Adsense, YPN, ValieClick, etc.), diggs into ad performance reports and shows ad units with highest payout and performance. It’s completely free, there are no charges or commissions. [Demo Video]

8. MyBlogLog – High chance you already have this one, but in case you don’t, definitely get it. There are two ways you can learn about your loyal readers, one is comments, and the other is MyBlogLog. I learned about many MUO fans this way: zia, pax, pster, mklopez, … . Btw, if you haven’t joined MakeUseOf community already, you can do so here.

9. FatFreeCart – Free shopping cart solution for your blog. It’s simple to implement (simply copy-paste) and works perfectly both with PayPal and Google Checkout.

10. Kontactr / Contactify – Both services let you create secure online ‘contact’ forms and embed it on your own blog. Or just link it from your blog using ‘contact’ link.

11. AddThis / ShareThis (Wordpress) / Madcast (Blogger, Typepad) – Let your visitors bookmark / save your posts to various social bookmarking sites, or forward as links via email.

12. Web2PDF – Free HTML to PDF conversion service for your website. Allows your readers to instantly print and save any article as PDF file. We publish lots of lists on MUO so it’s not really that useful for us, but in case you got plenty of lengthy posts than this is something your readers should appreciate. Read more about it here

That’s about it. Got anything to add? Let us know in comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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