My email address has been SPAM free up until now!

Not getting any spam at all is very rare.

You may get away with it for a long time, years even, until suddenly loads of pointless emails are showing up in your inbox.

You may wonder how spammers get your email address at all. There are lots of ways:

Spammers regularly scour the internet looking for anything that looks like an email address, and they start sending spam to it.

Businesses put their email addresses on their websites

This is a sure fire way of releasing your address to spammers, but you need to put a business email address on your website. You must make it easy for people to contact you from your site.

My advice in this situation is to have more than one email address. One common, public one and separate, private ones for each person in the business. That way you are fully aware of the one account likely to be spammed. The others can be used for current clients.

You may have put your email address out on a public website, newsgroup or forum

For example you mention your address in a comment you posted on a blog or it is made public once you leave a comment.

The above two are the most common way a spammer will harness email addresses. There are others.

A data breach.

Website data breaches mean that lists of legitimate email addresses become available for illegitimate marketers. For example the 2016 LinkedIn breach where a hacker stole credentials from millions of LinkedIn users. The email addresses get sold on, and your email address is inundated with SPAM emails. This happens infrequently, but unfortunately, websites cannot be 100% hardened 100% of the time.

A mailing list you joined may keep public archives on the web.

These archives often include the full mail header of each message, including your email address – ripe for harvesting by spammers.

A contact of yours forwarded an email you sent without removing your email address.

This happens a lot when something goes viral – your friend hits forward and does not remove the email headers. That email will be unintentionally forwarded to people who scan it for email addresses.

Some, less reputable companies will sell or rent a list of email addresses they’ve collected when people have purchase from them.

Maybe the spammer found your address when you sent an email.

Or; they guessed your email address. Yes, they just shoot in the dark! This is a really common way of getting addresses. Spammers often simply try sending email to every name at every web. This is why you should never reply to spam, no matter how angry you are!

What can you do about spam?

It is not advised to reply or unsubscribe to spam messages.

If you do respond the offending sender has confirmation that the address is active and that you read these types of messages.

Use the junk filter on your email client. Make sure you check the folder frequently to see if you have missed any important emails.

You can white list important addresses to make sure they do not disappear into the spam box.

If you get multiple spam messages from one specific address you can blacklist them, but it is infrequent that spammers will email from just one address.

You can reduce the amount of spam by:

Ask your service provider to increase the tolerance on the SPAM filter.

This can usually implemented by the company that supplies an email account. This can, however, mean that emails are missed.

Changing your email address from time to time.

This is especially harmful for businesses who have built a network of contacts, and a pain for home users too as everyone has to update contact details.

Use a challenge/response system – only people that prove they’re human can email you.

I do not recommend this solution for businesses either, but it may help home users.

What is challenge response? Every new sender is mailed a “challenge” i.e. a code to copy on the screen. If they respond correctly to the challenge the sender is automatically put on a white list. The original message is recovered and you can communicate with the now trusted sender unhampered.

How and why does one start getting SPAM?The only actual answer to spam email?

Unfortunately the only answer is to use the delete button.

Make sure you don’t delete the important emails.

Do not click or respond to any SPAM.

And try not to worry too much.

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