4 Ways to Reduce Spam If You are Already Getting Some

1. Find out whether your existing ISP or email provider has spam filtering as an option.

Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo both offer you the option to filter spam. Yahoo's is just on or off, but even when it's on, all filtered junk mail goes into a bulk mail folder, so you can easily review it to see whether anything that is not junk is getting filtered.

Hotmail has three levels of filtering. If you turn on the strictest level, make sure you "whitelist" all your friends and any companies from which you want to hear. Otherwise they may be filtered out by mistake.

Google has a mail program called Gmail that also has an excellent spam filter. AOL has filtered spam for years. Earthlink just announced that they would be filtering spam.

By default, the filtered mail is not accessible to you at all (to see whether it might be something you wanted to get); it just never shows up in your inbox. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes email you definitely want won't reach you. (The most famous case was AOL filtering out emailed acceptance letters from Harvard.) The settings can be changed now.

2. Turn on the built-in junk mail and pornography filters built into your desktop email software.

If you use Microsoft Outlook (2000 - 2003), you can turn it on by going into the Organizer of your Inbox, then clicking the Junk Mail link on the left and turning on filtering for junk spam mail and pornography separately.

Most other desktop software permits you to add senders to a "blacklist" or "blocked senders" list, which will keep someone from spamming you from the same address twice. Check the email help file to learn how to turn it on.

3. If you use desktop virus protection, consider buying the spam-filtering add-on product. Most virus-protection software providers offer a spam-filtering product.

4. If none of the above applies to you, consider a spam filtering system such as:

	CA Anti-Spam Plus CA Website Inspector provides effective, easy-to-use protection against unwanted spam and fraudulent phishing attacks. It helps ensure you get messages from people you know, while redirecting messages from people you don't, and works seamlessly with your email, web, instant messaging and office applications to help identify dangerous websites.
	IHateSpam - The ultimate weapon against junk email. Filters those irritating junk emails out of your inbox into a quarantine folder! No configuration or setup needed, install it once and it works! Does not lose emails you really need to see. Get control back over that flood of annoying and time-wasting email.
	MailWasher Pro - is the ultimate innovation in anti-spam software. Stop spam and unwanted email with MailWasher Pro. It's easy to use and very effective. Over 4 million downloads!

Some of these Spam filtering programs are free to try but expect that to change as the demand grows.