ArJ.uNo

Well I am one of those guys who get tons of mails everyday, but the main problem in my case is that I use to get many SPAM mails everyday. Well I thinks most of us have the same problem.
But today a miracle had happen its 11.26pm here and I have not received even a single unsolicited mail yet. And since its about half an hour left for the end of the day, I believe k wont get any more mails now. So I can confidently say that today is the day when I got not even a single spam mail in my inbox or even if I do its either trapped by Gmails spam assassin or has been automatically deleted by my own spam filtering method.
But what I want to share today is that why do we get spam mails and how to avoid it. If I start from scratch spam mail are basically promotional mails that we all receive everyday every-time, one good thought here is why do we get all such stuff? A one liner answer to this is because we all give our mail ids very easily to anyone and anywhere in the Internet and email spamming is considered as best and cheapest method to drive traffic on a website. Be cautious as spam mails contains various tricks like spoofing, phishing and spreading virus on your systems.
Although spamming is now considered as a very poor technique of website marketing (due to the great efforts done by Gmail/Yahoo/MS guys which makes them ineffective) still many folks try the same method to gather audience.
Well all I can say is follow these simple steps to make sure you wont get spammed anymore:
1) Create two email ids, one for handling your personal mails and other for giving it to websites all over the internet. Remember internet is a way good technology and you have to give your email ids for correspondence, separating personal mails and mails used for correspondence/contact purpose is a very nice method for managing your emails and is less irritating. One thing to consider is that every site won’t send you spam mails, only few will do. So don’t think that you should not give your email id to anyone.
2) Always mark spam to mails that are spam rather than just ignoring it, believe me you wont get at-least that kind of mail ever. And this will also block the source.
3) If you have your own domain or if you are planning to get one, make your mail id like [email protected] or [email protected], mails like this do not get even a single spam mail.
4) If you are publishing your email to your blog or any forum do write it like this yourmail [at] gmail [dot] com. This will avoid spam bots from capturing your mail. You may use your own method of writing your email on a forum page by editing the method given above.

And ya do change your password every 2 weeks and make it alphanumeric and add few special symbols to the same.

You may reach me via email at [email protected]

It seems to me that as you grow old, your rate of getting emails increases. Or at least thats the case for folks in academia it seems. The question is, how do you respond to these emails or take actions on these emails. This is what I do, and I am eager to know how others do it. I have a huge hierarchy of email folders and I have Inbox. There are different groups/clubs I am attached with. I have email filters which filter emails from these mailing lists and send them to their respective folders. These are the emails which I don’t want to respond to or read immediately. All my work emails and other emails remain in Inbox. And they remain there till I have taken action on them. That may mean just reading them again, or replying back or doing something else. So, basically, at any point of time, my Inbox has emails that are either unread or I haven’t taken action on them. Now sometimes, I get emails to which I want to respond but I don’t have time/I am lazy. They stay in Inbox. And sometimes they stay there for a month or so. And sometimes when I get back to those emails, I see that there is no point replying to them anymore. Now, I feel bad about that because I usually claim that if you have emailed me, I will reply to it even if I reply late. So, what do you do?

Source: How to handle emails – by rohitj (true copy)