In the previous post dedicated to the email spam statistics for August 2012, we have highlighted the 7 most important tips to stop junk mail. This list of spam prevention techniques definitely has to be extended and requires a dedicated blog post, so here we go!

Be careful with the email addresses that you use

1. Do not use your primary email addresses when registering online. If you don’t want to have your corporate or private email address jammed with spam – do not use them when registering for online promotions, contests, giveaways, download sites, etc.

2. Use a “disposable” email address for online registrations and one-time downloads. You can always create a new email account using free email providers like Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail. You don’t even need to waste time checking this email account for new messages, since you only provide the address to websites and forums as a log-in, and not to your friends or work contacts. If you are your own IT administrator, you can ask your email provider for a catchall service and then, when you signup anywhere, you can describe where you’re signing up before the  @ sign with your domain name following (example: forumname@yourdomain.com). With this method, you can just block all emails to that email address if you start getting spam for it.

3. Do not post your email address in public profiles visible by everyone. Keep from posting your email address on forums, blogs and public profiles. To automate the process, spammers use automatic programs to harvest emails, so you provide them with easy food when posting your email here and there.

If you really need to post your address, disguise it from the robots. You can choose to substitute some characters and separate them by brackets – so that your email address no longer looks like one. For example, if your email is “jack.rabbit@example.com”, write it out as “jack.rabbit [at] example [dot] com”.

4. Make your email address hard to guess. Some spam-sending programs coin email addresses using a combination of the randomly-used names and last names, and then send spam to the list of the newly created email addresses. If you don’t want to be included in such a list by accident, make sure to create an email address that is unique.

5. Be very attentive when filling out online forms. See if there are any boxes like “Send a catalogue”, “Receive monthly updates” or “Get free offers” which will often be checked by default. These check boxes are usually small or hidden. Also, read the privacy policy of the services you sign up for; you might unknowingly consent to spam being sent to you.

Remember the three NO’s: no opening, no clicking and no responding

6. Keep away from opening spam messages. When you open an email with graphics rendering turned on, the sender might receive an email delivery receipt which lets them know that your email address is valid. If you were using EmailTray, described below, spam messages would appear in the lower priority Inboxes where graphics rendering is automatically shut off.

7. Do not follow the links in a spam email. Such links might include malware which might result in identity theft. Even if you believe an email is legit, hover over the link with your cursor first to verify that the URL you’re being sent to is also legit.

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So you use email as one of the important channels for business and personal communication, receive tens or even hundreds of email messages per day, and get distracted to your Inbox many times a day… For those who practically apply time management principles to their everyday life, it is vital to use productivity tools to conquer information overload – in order to focus one’s attention on important tasks and eliminate unnecessary distractions.

So where is the way out? A smart email notifier is definitely the best solution here.
Why would you need an email notifier? There might be several reasons for that:

- You want to be focused on your daily tasks rather than checking mail dozens of time per day
- You don’t want to miss any important emails
- You want to know about each important mail in time, not in a batch only three times a day (which is what some email overload experts have suggested as a strategy).

In other words, a good email notifier is supposed to free up your hands and save your time, help you manage email efficiently, let you focus on important tasks and improve your email productivity.

Standard features expected in a simple email notifier

• Easy and hassle-free setup
• Popular Webmail provider support
• POP3 and IMAP support, including SSL
• No limit on the number of email accounts to track
• Visual and sound notifications that can be disabled on demand

Extra features you would love to have

• Tray icon notifications about new important emails
• Access to the Inbox directly through the email notifier
• Custom mail check interval for each email account
• Locking your email data with a password
• Low cost, or NO cost at all

Advanced features of a smart email notifier

• A smart email sorting mechanism which ranks emails by priority
• Notifications about IMPORTANT emails only
• Smart reminders
• Ability to sync mail data between your desktop and Android devices
• Having messages from the Spam folders of all your accounts aggregated in one place for a quick check and mass deletion

Do you want to get the most out of your email software? Then go for EmailTray, a FREE email client and a smart email notifier which offers you everything you could ever dream about in an email client.

EmailTray offers easy and lightning-fast setup: just enter the login and password details for each email account (this data will be stored locally on your PC), and this smart email client will configure everything for you.

EmailTray supports all popular Webmail providers (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and AOL Mail), POP3 and IMAP accounts. You are not limited to the number of email accounts to track.

With EmailTray, you can read, reply to and forward emails in HTML; open, save and send attachments, take advantage of the instant search feature, manage your contacts and sync them with your Android devices… and more.

Thanks to an advanced email sorting mechanism, EmailTray knows which emails you need to attend to first and it does not bother you with each and every email. It will notify you about the top priority emails only with a popup window and sound.

EmailTray software is available both as a Windows email client and an Android email app. In fact using EmailTray on several devices improves the accuracy of email sorting across all your devices, as EmailTray remembers the email actions you applied to each email sender and uses this data for better email sorting.

New mail notifications in the EmailTray Windows email client

New mail notifications in the EmailTray mail app for Android