6 Simple Tips for Decreasing Spam & Phishing Emails

1) Do not use the Auto Reply feature when Out-of-Office. It confirms to spammers that your email address is valid, making it more valuable and it will be sold to many more spammers.

2) Do use other email tools. In addition to back-end Exchange server policies usually managed by an IT person,Outlook offers several user-side rules, such as:

1. Standard Rules & Alerts – Tell Outlook to automatically put emails from certain people/clients into specific folders. This can also be done for emails with specific words in the subject.
2. Custom Rules – There are some words that will never be in a legitimate email (or at least not an important one). These are most often vulgarities and misspelled spam words like m0rtgage, V1agra, etc. Also, unless you have clients or friends in Nigeria, you probably won’t be getting notification of any inheritances. You can take all of these undesired words and tell Outlook to delete emails containing them immediately, or to put them into a special “probably spam” folder.

3) Change your email address occasionally. Simply adding the number 1, 2 , etc. to the end of your name every couple of years can dramatically reduce spam. Let your regular clients know by simply adding a note on each your outbound emails for at least 30 days in advance.

4) Don’t post your email openly on websites. There are bots that can detect them and add them to spam lists. Try obfuscating them, like Editor (at) CPAPracticeAdvisor (dot) com.

5) Have a “throwaway” account. Use a free email account for signing up for some things.

6) Don’t use “unsubscribe” links, unless you know the company. If you don’t remember signing up for what looks like spam, then using the unsubscribe link just confirms your email as valid.

* Special thanks to Jakin Heusinkveld, a member of Cygnus Business Media’s IT staff, for contributing.