While spam is a fact of life these days and if you’re already receiving it, difficult to get rid of, there a few things you can do to prevent or reduce it’s appearance.

1. Never give out your email address to someone you don’t know or trust.Treat it like your phone number or home address.

2. Switch on junk mail filters that come with your mail system.Outlook, Hotmail and AOL all have built-in filters, make sure these are turned on.

3. When creating your email address use letters, number and underscore if possible.This makes it more difficult for spammers to find your email address using automated email generators.

4. Create a second dummy or junkmail address to use online.Use this if you need to register on a site.You can always change it later.

5. Never respond to emails unless they’re from someone you know or something you’ve personally subscribed to – it just confirms your address is valid and you’ll keep getting more spam as valid emails are traded amongst spammers.

6. Never forward spam or chain emails – you risk forwarding on your own and other’s email addresses for the world and spammers to see. Use sites like BreakTheChain and Snopes to check for hoax and chain emails.

7. Never unsubscribe from ‘spam’ email – sometimes all this does is just validate your address and it gets passed on. Unsolicited email from valid businesses should give an option to unsubscribe.

8. Wise-up. You really won’t win a lottery you never entered. You aren’t going to receive thousands for helping a nigerian businessman, african politician … get his money out of the country. Banks will usually address you by name, not ‘Dear Customer’.

9. Never click on links in spam emails – phishing emails will capture your userid/pswd or account details on a ‘fake’ website.Checkthe actual URL address in the email – it’s usually obvious it’s faked. (Usually displayed on the bottom of the screen, in a pop-up when you hover over it).

10. Use Anti-virus software.It doesn’t take much for a virus to slip through, especially in a tempting attachment. Better to protect yourself than risk losing data.McAfee, Norton and AVG do online versions ‘that automatically update.

And on that subject – take regular back-ups.Where would you be if you lost your PC for a period of time?How valuable is your work?

If you’d like to find out more about how you could put some systems and strategies in place to enable you to be more organised, then call or email me for a free consultation.