8 Tips For Handling Email Effectively

 
With the ever-increasing amount of spam, junk email, and viruses, using your email accounts effectively has become a very important. Here are eight tips that can help you handle your email better and reduce the amount of spam and junk email you receive:

1. You can reduce junk email and spam dramatically simply by setting your "default" or "catch-all" email account to 'bounce default email' by configuring your mail server.
   
   This will cause all email messages sent to addresses at your domain name that do not have a specific email box setup to be bounced instead of forwarded to one of your existing email boxes. This alone could prevent about 60-80% of junk emails from entering your domain.
    
2. If you do not check your email accounts regularly, spam and junk email can overflow your email account disk space limit and cause your email service to stop and not be able to receive any more legitimate emails.
   
   To make sure that you are checking all your email accounts at the server, check your server mail folder and inside you will see files associated with each email account, if the size of the files are large, that means that there are emails in that account that need to be downloaded or deleted.
    
3. In the event that you setup an email account at your domain to forward to an outside email address, make sure to "unselect" the option to store email on the server in your mail manager, otherwise this will cause duplicate emails to be saved on the server causing your disk space usage to go up.
    
4. Install a server side spam filtering tool and use it properly to reduce spam and junk email. A spam filter can be a powerful tool provided that you configure and use it effectively. Ask your web hosting provider if they have a server-side spam filter for you to use.
    
5. Install server-side Virus Protection in order to prevent virus attachments from entering your email inbox and infecting your PC. This can also be an important tool to consider when selecting a web hosting provider. 
    
6. Use the Secure Socket Layer encryption protocol to download your email through an SSL server, so that no one can intercept and read your emails while they are being downloaded.
    
7. Set your disk space usage alarm to let you know if you get close to your disk space quota. Remember, if you max out your disk space quota (sometimes this happens with email accounts receiving an excessive amount of junk email), your email service stops completely, so be warned to take action before hand.
    
8. Use forms on your website instead of a simple HTML email link for your website's visitors to use to contact you. That way the email harvester robots can't pull your email address from your site to be added to spam lists.
   
   Finally, make sure you don't give out your primary email address to online websites that give away free stuff unless you are aware of the company and know who they are. Many of these websites simply sell your information to spammers.

Article courtesy of Vitto Fellini and SuperNova.Net Web Hosting.

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