I’ve been trying to decide if this was a worthwhile post for a few days now. I’m sure that some of you are already using these tips (at least the first one) on a regular basis. However, I decided there are still a considerable amount of people who could use the advice! So, let’s get right to it!

(1) Unsubscribe from those pesky mailing lists rather than just delete the emails.

Most of the “junk” email I get in my Gmail Inbox is from companies which I have some type of relationship with. Maybe it was an online store I shopped at, a bank/credit card I have, or some forum I joined years ago. The point is, these people are not the typical spammers trying to sell me Viagra or tips to enlarge my you-know-what. Luckily, Gmail filters out most of that REAL junk. Anyway, most of the emails I’m focusing on come from fairly respectable companies who decided they would add me to their monthly mailing lists. DO NOT WANT!

To fix this issue, I’ve made a habit of scrolling to the bottom of these emails and clicking the “Unsubscribe” link. Generally it takes a few seconds and you’re off the list…never to be bothered again. It might take a few seconds longer than hitting the delete button, but those seconds start to add up every month.

(2) Make use of the Gmail aliases built into your account.

This trick is for Gmail users only. If you don’t have a Gmail account, what are you waiting for? Last week I was reading a nifty article from Google about how to become a “Gmail ninja”. I learned something completely new that really could make a difference in the spam war. The trick here is that Gmail allows you to have an infinite number of aliases for you’re account. Aliases allow you to have multiple email addresses which all redirect to the same mailbox. For example, let’s say my email is jason@gmail.com. I can add a “+” at the end of jason and put any letters or numbers after it. I could have jason+facebook@gmail.com or jason+junk@gmail.com, for example. All of these emails will come to my Inbox and it’s up to me to create filters for them if I want to. (If you need help working with filters, check out this Help document.)

This is very powerful if you want total control of your mail. You can create specialized addresses and filters for certain sites or uses. A cool use of this would be to create unique ones for certain websites and then monitor the spam you receive to see if these sites were sharing your email address. It’s a bit tedious, but it might be a cool experiment!

Lastly and sort of related, I found a site called 10 Minute Mail.  This site generates a temporary email address for you with a 10 minute timeout, just enough time to receive that account validation email. It’s great for making quick anonymous accounts on the interwebs.