Once you have been online for awhile you will start to see an increase in the amount of Spam, or unsolicited email, that you receive on a daily basis. Some web marketers report getting up to 100 or more per day, and we want to show you how to reduce the amount of time you waste dealing with this "problem."

One thing that you definitely do NOT want to do is go crazy every time you receive an unsolicited email. We know people who spend a tremendous amount of time and resources arguing with spammers and trying to get their accounts canceled, but it's a waste of your time. Do not allow yourself to be sucked into this losing battle.

Besides, replying to unsolicited email only tells the spammer that they have your valid email address -- and chances are that this action will actually increase the spam you get.

While you may want to occasionally (and rightfully) "fight back" against an especially offensive or aggressive spammer, the best thing to do with most unsolicited email that you receive is to simply delete it -- which only takes one second. Even if you get 100 pieces of Spam per day, honestly, how long does it take to delete 100 messages? Not that long.

"But," you might say, "I have to read all of these messages to make sure it's nothing important!" Or you might say, "Downloading and deleting Spam uses up a lot of my resources." Well, the answer to both is yes and no. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First we'll show you how to eliminate the most common source of Spam -- your very own web site -- then we'll show you how to deal with the rest in an efficient and systematic manner.

An Easy Way To Reduce Unsolicited Emails

Would you believe that you are probably inviting at least 50% of the unsolicited emails that you receive on a daily basis? It's true! One of the most popular ways spammers build their Spam lists is by harvesting email addresses from the web -- and if you have included one or more email addresses anywhere on your web site you can be sure that hundreds or even thousands of spammers will "harvest" your email addresses right off of your web site using a variety of automated tools designed for this purpose.

Fortunately, there is a very easy way to prevent this. But it's often overlooked and chances are that you wouldn't think of this on your own, so pay close attention ...

Without getting too technical, every alphanumeric character (and some others) can be represented by a series of character codes in your HTML document. By using these HTML entities in your mailto: links on your site as opposed to the corresponding letter or number you can render your email addresses useless to the automated harvesting programs (often called "spambots").

If you're already confused, don't worry about it -- you don't really have to understand how or why this works. Just use this Email Encoder (at http://emailaddresses.com/mailto_encoder.htm) to do the dirty work for you. You simply type in any email address and it will output a "munged" version that you can safely use in your site's mailto links -- the harvesting programs will choke on it every time they try to harvest your email addresses.

With spammers unable to harvest off of your web site you will literally see a 50-75% reduction in the number of unsolicited emails that you receive on a daily basis. If you "munge" all of the email addresses that you publish, and don't use them when posting to discussion forums you won't get much Spam at all.

If posting to public discussion forums is something that you do on a regular basis you should set up a special email address for this purpose -- either a special address on your own domain or a free email address from http://www.hotmail.com or any other free service. This way the Spam you do receive won't be mixed in with your important email and it will make it easier to manage.

Setup Some Spam Filters

The above tip will really help, but agreeably it won't eliminate all of the unsolicited emails that you are probably getting now. Why don't you go ahead and launch your favorite email client and we'll show you how to deal with this "problem" once and for all. Note that you will need to be using an email client that supports email "filters" -- such as Eudora or Outlook.

You might not have noticed, but the overwhelming majority of unsolicited emails that you get are NOT addressed to you personally. Next time you get spammed, look at the "to" field in the message headers and chances are you won't see your email address -- you probably won't see your email address anywhere in the headers for that matter (such as in the "cc" field as well).

The simple reason for this is that most spammers will include your email address in the "bcc" header of the message -- this way they can Spam thousands of people at once without a huge list of email addresses appearing anywhere in the headers.

Fortunately for you this provides an easy way to filter most of the Spam you receive right into the trash, or into another mailbox specifically created for this purpose. Just create a filter on your incoming email that looks for your email address (or your domain name if you have multiple email addresses) in the "to" field of all the messages that you receive.

If your specific email address or domain name is not found in the "to" field this means the message wasn't addressed to you individually -- and 9 out of 10 times this means Spam. However, be careful. Some of the ezines that you subscribe to may fall into this category, so that's why it's actually a good idea to have the "questionable" emails filtered into a separate mailbox rather than having it automatically deleted by the filter.

There are a bunch of anti-spam software programs that you can use -- most are called "plugins" and they interface with your email client -- and you can easily find these by using a popular search engine to search for "+outlook +spam +plugin" or "+eudora +spam +plugin", etc. You'll likely find a whole bunch with names like SpammerSlammer (at http://www.spammerslammer.com/) SpamBeGone (at http://www.internz.com/SpamBeGone/) etc.

Spam Can Actually Be Quite Useful

Once a day (or however often you want) go through your Spam mailbox just to make sure there's nothing important in there. Believe it or not, Spam can actually be quite useful and you may want to quickly glance at all of these messages anyway. You'll find that some of the "subject" lines spammers use to get your attention are quite effective, and you may want to modify or adapt a few for your own use (of course, for your non-spam).

I've actually come up with a few great ideas by reading Spam, so the two seconds that you spend skimming each message isn't a total loss. One good idea is literally all you need to make a fortune online, and you never know where it may come from.

What To Do With All of This Spam