Spam Prevention Tips for Gmail

Gmail spam recognition technology is the best in its class. Even Yahoo, Hotmail or Lycos could not beat Google at this. It’s very rare that you find any spam in your inbox. But what annoys the most is the growing number of mails in the spam folder. Cleaning your spam folder regularly makes Gmail look more gorgeous and lovely.

Have you ever wondered that despite Gmail’s exclusive spam fighting filters and user’s privacy concern, how these salesmen get into your inbox? It’s all your fault. Distributing your email address to forums, groups, chat rooms and everywhere over the internet.

Let’s analyze how spammers get your email address. A primary source is chat rooms, forums, and groups where people normally mention their email. The second source is the internet itself. You either write your email at some public place or list it in some attractive offers. Other less significant sources include mail servers and search engines.

Spammers are basically salesmen, trying to sell you explicit material, drugs or stock options. Spammers use codes of software called spambots that crawl over the internet, collecting anything that has @ between two words. So these spambots will automatically search for emails generating a mailing list which will be bombarded with spams.

I will discuss two different genre tricks to bypass spammers.

The first trick is for the users who need to submit there mail id’s for different service sign-ups, for offers or for activations. In order to protect your id’s falling in hands of spammers, Gmail comes to rescue. Gmail, virtually offers unlimited aliases. That means you can have numerous Gmail id’s delivered to the same inbox. These aliases can be made by using the operator plus ‘+’. For example, if your Gmail id is larry@gmail.com then your aliases can be larry+sergey@gmail.com, larry+microsoft@gmail.com or larry+anything@gmail.com. All these Gmail ids will share the same inbox with larry@gmail.com.

You can now create a filter to apply fewer priority stars or some specific label that will identify all mails send to user.name+anything@gmail.com. If you discover spam mails coming to that address then modify the filter to transfer all mails to spam or trash folder.
Alternatively, once you have subscribed/activated some service with that Gmail alias, you can create a filter that will transfer all mails send to user.name+anything@gmail.com to the trash folder. Now even if spammer picks up that email id, he would never find a way to your inbox.

The other trick is for bloggers, website owners, and forum members who can post their HTML signatures. These signatures are mostly email addresses. What if your email id is not in text format but some image? The spambot could never recognize that email address because its an image but it would be displayed to all readers. Blog/website owners can use this tool for generating free email icon.

Some of the popular email address icons are:

Gmail email address