Toolbox for MS Outlook

How to Stop Spam

Spam filters don't work and whatever you do, your email address will pick up spam eventually. So, the answer is to change it as soon as it does so.

Don't worry, you shouldn't lose contact with your friends & relatives as most email addresses can be set up to provide an auto-responder informing the sender of your new address. Of course spammers will never read that reply so your new address will be safe.

If your email provider doesn't offer this service, you should consider buying a domain name, which will give you the ability to create multiple email addresses from the same domain. Domain names only cost a few pounds a year (e.g. www.ukreg.com).

If you do buy a domain name, set the default routing to "bounce". Spammers will send to a domain by just going through the dictionary and lists of names. I tested this once and found 6,000 spam messages a day being sent to one of our domains, all to nonexistent names.

If you really must use a spam filter - get yourself a free Google mail account - which has pretty good spam filtering, and redirect all your email to that. You can even forward it on from gmail to another account once it has been filtered.