How to Stop Unwanted E-mail

Video transcription

Got your inbox full? Can't sort out the valid emails from the invalid ones, the spam? I'm Chris Cook with Security Awareness Incorporated. Let's talk about stopping or reducing unwanted email. First of all, a lot of spam originates from people going out onto the internet and signing up for things on websites. Such as free ecards, signing up for contests, sweepstakes, a lot of times the companies collecting this information take it and they sell it to spammers. Naughty naughty. But what happens there is that mailing list then gets merged with other mailing lists and your email address gets circulated all over the place. Suddenly your inbox is full and there's not a single message in there that you really wanted. So, if you're going to use websites for things such as contests or sweepstakes or sending ecards, try using one of the disposable free email services. You can set up an email address that's kind of meaningless and is not going to interfere with your work email or your personal email that's coming in. So to use something such like Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo to set up a free email account for that type of stuff. Now, if you want to reduce the amount of email that's coming into one of your email accounts, what you can do is on your email client, set up a junk mail or a spam filter. If you have an online email service such as AOL or MSN, a lot of times they'll have a spam filter in place that you can turn on or off within your mailbox there. That'll help filter out a lot of the unwanted stuff as well, but unfortunately you may have to check those folders to make sure that necessary email is not going into there as well. You can reduce the amount by not using your valid e-mail addresses or your important email addresses on the web and then you can know that one of your valid email addresses that are receiving them, you can reduce the amount there by using your spam filter or a junk mail filter. I'm Chris Cook with Security Awareness Incorporated.