The Tech+ Guide to controlling spam from strangers, marketers and cyber tricksters

I heard from many readers regarding last week’s column about why email spam still exists. An overwhelming majority of readers agreed that marketers shouldn’t be given a free pass to send us messages we didn’t request.

What’s nice about having this column is that readers often respond with their own tips, suggestions and complaints. So, I took them all in and combined them with my own to offer you a guide to dealing with spam.

Get off email lists you don’t want, especially if you remember signing up for them. If you’ve stopped shopping at Buy Buy Baby, for example, by all means hit that “unsubscribe” button. But if you don’t recognize the retailer or the sender, either ignore it, send it to spam or be skeptical because in this age of slick cyber tricksters, you don’t want to mess with clicking a link in an unsolicited email.

Get your email off as many lists as possible via resources provided by the government, industry and marketing organizations:

1. Opt out of credit and insurance offers: Either call 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688) or visit optoutprescreen.com.
2. DMAChoice.org — Register online with the DMA and pay $2 to sort through what you want or don’t want to receive. You can also print out this form and mail it in: Details at: dmachoice.thedma.org/static/pdf/registration_form.pdf

Complain to someone who might actually do something:

1. The Federal Trade Commission wants to know if a company is mishandling your personal information:  ftccomplaintassistant.gov. At the same site (see this link), the FTC says to go ahead and forward unwanted emails to spam@uce.gov.
2. If spam seems to be coming from a well-known retailer or business, contact the business separately and tell them about it. If the business didn’t send it, they may already be working to end the imposters.
3. And it goes without saying, if your friend is spamming you with stuff he or she shouldn’t be, their email was probably spoofed. Let them know about it by some alternate means.

Use a different email address. Don’t just share your personal email with just any stranger. Creating a separate one will also preserve your privacy:

1. Create a separate email address to share for all those sites that force you to share an email. Gmail, Yahoo, etc. are happy to provide a free one.
2. If you use Google’s Gmail, you can tweak your email address to share with strangers by adding a “+” and a word to it. For example, if denver@gmail.com was my address, it becomes an alias if I add denver+marketer@gmail.com.  The message still winds up in my inbox, but if I tire of the senders, I can filter out “+marketer” and send it straight to spam.
3. If you own your own domain, and not many consumers do, you can set up unique email addresses for every site you share your email with. So, if you own denver.com, you could sign up for my newsletter with techplus@denver.com.  There are a few more steps to doing this, but if you own your own domain, you’re probably already familiar with this.

Use the tools your email service provides. Google, Yahoo and other major providers don’t want their own systems to get infected or go down because one of their email users inadvertently clicked a link or fake unsubscribe button. Most have buttons to send messages directly to spam or a junk folder. But some offer other interesting features:

1. Most email providers have a button to send a message straight to spam. Keep doing this because companies, like Yahoo, use SpamGuard, to learn what you and others consider spam.
2. Microsoft Outlook offers a “Sweep” button on the toolbar that clean up all messages from spammy senders. More details are here and here.
3. Gmail can auto-manage email by putting what it deems “promotional” into a separate tab so you don’t see the message when looking at your inbox. But they’re just a tab away when you have time.
4. Gmail and Yahoo offer a way to send messages to spam, and they’ll unsubscribe you too.
5. Let your spam folder take care of itself. Yahoo lets you set the frequency of cleanup from a week to once a month (the default).

Use well-known free tools. I cut and pasted this set of tips from an older Tech+ Q&A, but they’re all still valid. Return Path, an email data technology firm that studies how brands can get e-mails into billions of inboxes, set up otherinbox.com, which offers free tools to help consumers manage their inbox. A few of the anti-spam ones:

• Unsubscriber: Adds a folder to your e-mail service so drag and drop messages you once subscribed to, at getunsubscriber.com
• Love Your Emails: An iPhone app that filters messages into legimiate, low-priority and spam at otherinbox.com/love-your-emails
• Mailpile: Not only does this open-source e-mail program filter out spam as best as it can (it also recommends boosting security with an up-to-date antivirus program), but it keeps messages encrypted, at mailpile.is

Don’t feel sorry for marketers. It’s easy for marketers to buy email addresses in bulk. But don’t feel bad for not hitting “Unsubscribe.” They know if you open the message. They know if you click on a link. And they really know if you take the effort to respond. In fact, companies like ReturnPath, which handles billions of email, has numerous articles like this one that try to educate marketers on why they shouldn’t make it hard to unsubscribe and why they shouldn’t fight those unsubscribers. It’s the marketers’ responsibility to look at stats and stop sending spam to users who don’t even open a message.

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