Nobody likes spam. It seems almost impossible to stop it. This tutorial will show how to keep spammers at bay. I take a three-pronged attack against spam. First, prevent spam. Second, stop spam at your e-mail server. Finally, filter spam from am e-mail program. Following these steps, spam will be a thing of the past. It is very rare that I get spam anymore.

The first line of defense is prevention. How is it possible to keep spammers from sending spam. That is easy. Let spammers send spam to a fake e-mail. Setup a "fake" e-mail address to receive spam. I have an e-mail that I use for my personal communications with friends, a business e-mail, and a "fake" one for spam. There are web sites that ask you for an e-mail address and that is when I give my "fake" e-mail. Most Internet Service Providers (ISP) allow you to have multiple e-mail accounts. Set one up that you will only give to friends and family and one for web sites or strangers.

Another tactic that spammers use is called a spambot. Spambots search web sites that contain e-mail addresses. Almost every site has a contact e-mail address and these spambots find these addresses and send the information to the spammer. This gives spammers a constant fresh list of e-mails to spam. Use Enkoder Form 5.1 by Hiveware to fight spam when putting an e-mail address on a web site. Fill out a form and it will create an encoded e-mail link to use on a web site. With the e-mail encoded, spambots will not be able to get an e-mail address and won't be able to send spam. I use it for all of my sites and my clients' sites to keep them from getting spam.

If you do receive spam, do not click on the "remove" link. More often than not this is just a link to let spammers know that an e-mail address is active and to send more spam.

The next step in fighting spam is to block it at the server. I use Earthlink as my ISP and it comes with Spam Blocker. It is not enabled by default, I have to activate it myself. It blocks all known spammers, so spam never makes it to the inbox. I found this was effective in blocking almost all of my spam. The spam never even makes it to my computer. I check it about once a week to make sure it didn't block any e-mail I wanted (so far this has never happened). It has only blocked spam.

Most ISPs offer some sort of spam blocking. If yours doesn't, I would recommend switching your ISP to a company that does. Not all Spam blockers work the same so be sure to read how yours works to use it effectively. Click Here for a list of ISPs that fight spam from spam.abuse.net

The last step is to filter spam on your computer. Programs like Outlook Express come with a feature called rules. You can create rules to tell Outlook how to handle e-mail if it follows a certain criteria. I have found this to be ineffective against spam. Spammers are constantly changing how they send spam and you will find yourself constantly writing new rules. Instead, I use Bayesian filtering to filter spam.

Spammers use certain words in their e-mails. A Bayesian filter will read through e-mails and run a probability algorithm to decide whether e-mail is spam. Now this may sound exactly like making rules in outlook, but there is one difference. Bayesian filtering programs are constantly learning. Every time you get spam, it improves the chances for catching spam. It will also look at your normal e-mails and learn which e-mails you like to keep. This cuts down on the number of false positives. You don't have to worry about losing important e-mails. Sspammers can continue to change their tactics and Bayesian filters will constantly adapt for these changes.

I use a spam filter called POPfile. POPfile is a free open-source program that can be used on multiple platforms. It acts as a middleman between your e-mail program and your e-mail server. It will recieve your spam for you.

Using the above techniques gets rid of 99.99% of my spam. Good luck in your fight against spam and be sure to spread the word to your friends and family so they can fight spam too. If you would like to learn more about spam and the latest news in fighting spam checkout SPAM.ABUSE.NET. If you would like to become more active in the fight against spam go to SPAM COP