How to stop junk mail from arriving

Unwanted email is known as spam, and is an unsolicited message sent to an email address for the sole purpose of advertising their products or services. Spam can cause clutter in your email inbox. There are some steps that you can take to prevent and stop junk mail from arriving in your inbox. Once you follow these steps, you should see a decrease in junk mail.

Contact your ISP

Complain to your ISP about the junk mail you are receiving in your email inbox. ISPs do not like spam either as they clog up their servers. They can filter out mail that has a suspected spam email address. This can take time, as they will not know from the beginning every message that has a suspect email address.

Do not show your email address

Do not show your email address in Internet chat rooms or forums. Only show your email addresses on secure sites and to people you know. Do not display your email address when you post to newsgroups. Be careful if you use a free ISP or free email account. Some of these services make their money by letting sponsors send email messages to their subscribers. Not all free ISP services do this, but some do and you should be careful when choosing one. Send a complaint message to the postmaster of the spam email you receive, if you can find it. Most spammers will forge the return address, but you may be able to figure out the ISP by looking at the email header information. You can click Show Details in some email programs to show this information. In other programs, you can right-click the email message and select Options or Properties to display this information.

Use a spam filter

Use a spam filter if your email provider does not have one which is built-in to their software. There are free spam filters available for immediate download on the Internet. Purchase anti-spam software such as Spamkiller or CYBERSitter. You can also search for email filter software using your favourite search engine to find free anti-spam applications. In many cases, free software applications will work as well as the paid versions of the same software.