How to protect yourself from spam email

If you have an email account, chances are that you receive at least one piece of spam email a day.  Like junk mail you get in the post, it is likely to be unsolicited advertisements. Although a lot spam email is just a nuisance, some can be harmful to you and your computer. It can cause viruses and identity theft, contain inappropriate content and hog your bandwidth.

Here are a few tips to help protect you again spam emails:

• Install spam filtering software – It can help detect spam and prevent it reaching your inbox
• Never respond to suspicious emails – Just delete it and do not open or click attachments. If there are unsubscribe links, don’t use them as they might be phony.
• Create an email name that’s tough to crack – Research shows that email addresses containing numbers, letters and underscores are more difficult to guess and tend to receive less spam.
• Create a spam filter for your email – Make sure your email program has a defence against spam by manually blocking, on Outlook, a specific email address or topic that you don’t want to receive.
• Watch out for those checked boxes – When signing up for something with your email, make sure you read the options correctly and don’t select that you want to be contacted by third parties.