How to stop spam robots, and properly deal with email spam.

I would like to help you avoid putting your email address into the hands of the spammers.

Help yourself and your fellows in the Internet Community
When you read this article and feel you can supply the Internet community with more info that I divulge in this article, I want you to do so. Post your related comments, and help us all minimize the amount of SPAM online, and fight the spammers, stopping them from slandering good programs and fine email services.

Fact to accept about spam:
If you're into online marketing you will, sooner or later start receiving spam.

This article is written with the purpose of protecting your personal email. As a serious online entrepreneur you will, most likely, have other business related email accounts, they will get more spam than your personal email, or at least that is my aim with this article.

Secondly I will show how you can get back at spammers, reporting them for spam, hopefully closing their email accounts and getting them banned from the programs they promote.

Email Spam
This article is only about the kind you get in your email. I am aware of the many other types of spam, and these will be covered in other articles.

Let's look at how spammers get to your email address:
1: Posting it on your website
2: Posting it on blogs or other places you comment and leave your email address
3: Facebook profile
4: Any other public profile wherer you have allowed your email address to be seen by the other members of the community and also the general public.

The list goes on, but I'm sure you get the point :-)

The thing is, the professional spammers have robots just scouring the net for email addresses, and they will harvest your email from whatever source online.

Now just like with everything else, there are some spammers that are really good at spamming and some that are trying it for the first time.

Some of the inexperienced spammers don't think of it as spam to send you email because you accepted them as contacts on some kind of online community, have you ever experienced that? It's stil unsolicited mail!

So what can be done to avoid too much spam (because as stated previously you WILL get it, sooner or later).

Protect your email with another email
Well for starters don't post your personal email address too much publicly, or if you must post everywhere, create an email with the intention of using this as a mail you use when commenting to blogs etc.

This will save your personal email from the spammers, to some degree anyway.

Also when you sign up for things online, be it marketing resources, newsletters or anything else, use this "extra" email. Even though what you join looks very professional I've been burned at times, getting spam to a brand new email address, that had only been used in that one place. If the place checks out, you can always change the email address.

Another trick, although I think this can only be used on your personal webpages, is to spam protect your email address. This is done with a little nifty tool from a danish site called HTML.dk (great resource by the way)

"Danish, Ain't that something you eat?!?!"
That is where the appreciation for googles translation tool starts, becuase you can have the article and the tool translated into English, with the click on your mouse.

The coveted tool to annihilate the spam robots
Beside the tool, the article also discusses some other tricks that I will not go into here, but click below to read them yourself.

Just insert the URL's below to googles translator tool and have it translate the page into your native tongue:
Googles translation tool: http://translate.google.com
The article: http://www.html.dk/artikler/00041/
The spam robot protection tool: http://www.html.dk/artikler/00041/convert_email.asp

What to do if you are already getting spammed?
Actually, first, let me cover what NOT to do, explanation will follow.

There are some golden rules:
1: DO NOT hit the reply button and yell at them
2: DO NOT use the remove option

"But why?" can I hear you say. Well, fact is that spammers like to know if your email is active. If you reply to them they will flag your email as such, and they will compile lists of these active email adresses and sell on to other spammers, resulting in you getting more spam. Same goes for remove link, which in any case is just fake and just replies to the email.

Ok, so what do you do?

If you're lazy you can just delete it, but that is not the point of this article. My mission is to make the spammer hurt as he has hurt you so, you report them to the proper channels.


How to report spammers properly
Now it would be nice if there was a central organization delaing with all spam reports, but this is not the case, instead you report them to two places:
1: The email provider they use (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc)
2: The owners of the program they are advertising

"But isn't that so tedious and hard and boring, and will the program owners even care?" is what I can hear you thinking (did I mention that I was psychic)

The answer is NO! And that is because it's refreshing to get the reply from the providers that they have now disciplined the user for spamming. Also knowing that you've just helped the whole Internet Community become a better place is a very satisfactory feeling.

Remember to use a proper tone of voice. You are not being spammed by the owners of the program, but by some of their less knowledgeable affiliates.

So, for the email providers you just forward the mail to their abuse department:
abuse@google.com
abuse@hotmail.com
etc. etc

With Yahoo it's a bit different. Sending a mail to their abuse department will give you a reply that you need to take matters into your own hands,  because they want you to do some work (perhaps that is why spam is REALLY rampant at yahoo) but it's actually very simple. The link to their spam complaint page is this:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/spam.html

And in regards to the programs, you do the same. Maybe they don't have an active email account at abuse@programname.com then you try support@programname.com, or info@programname.com


Bask in the glory of the replies you get
Most program owners will be happy for the report and send you nice replies like the ones I've gotten a lot of.
Here are two recent examples:

Reply From outbacktraffic:
Reply  from Clickbank:

Hello,

 

We have notified the user "******"  that they have been charged with a spam complaint. ClickBank has no tolerance for spammers. Spam damages our brand name and irritates the Internet community at large. We will terminate his account if there is no action taken.

 

Thank you,

ClickBank Security Team

abuse@clickbank.com

(I've inserted these *'s to protect the member, he now knows what NOT to do, Allan)

Share your comments

Now I've told you what I do to protect against and fight spam. Like I mentioned in the start, let me and the Internet Community know if you have additions of your own, how to combat this problem.