Spam includes messages that have malware attachments, are part of some type of fraudulent scheme, or are associated with cyberbullying, online child predators, or other illegal or undesirable activities. There are many types of spam, and most share one or more of the following characteristics:

* They demand your time and energy, but provide little or no benefit.

* They have unexpected and potentially harmful attachments.

* Are intended to harass, embarrass or intimidate the recipient.

* Chain letters, bogus offers, rumors, and other information that lacks authority, usefulness, or validity.

* Encourage visits to websites associated with malware, fraudulent activity, or inappropriate content.

* Make unsolicited offers of some type of commercial product or service.

As long as your child has an active email address, someone will be willing to send them email they don’t want to read. While no one technique or toll can get rid of all spam, you can help your child reduce the chance of someone spamming by taking the following steps to make their email address less visible online or out of line:

1. Choose mailing lists carefully: Encourage your child to only join mailing lists that send out useful and valuable information. Also, your child should only join mailing lists that have a simple procedure for removing an address.

two. Avoid having an email address posted online– If your child has to put an address on a web page, use a secondary or throwaway address that can be canceled if they start getting too many spam emails.

3. Make it difficult for a machine to read an email address: There are many “email harvesting” programs that automatically look for email addresses on web pages, blogs, and other online locations. These addresses are then sold in bulk so companies can send unsolicited emails to unwelcome recipients. One way to make it harder for these automated email harvesting programs to read the email address is to add a space after and before the “@” sign in the address. A human being would have the good sense to remove whitespace, but a program would not. Another way is to display the email address in a graphic instead of text.

Four. Do not volunteer to receive email: During the registration process, many online services such as email accounts or social networking sites ask if you want to receive product updates, newsletters, or other information by email. If this happens, the safest option is to decline. If your child chooses to receive this type of email, only allow it if the site makes it easy for them to be removed from mailing lists.

5. Use a secondary email address for administrative purposes: Anytime you do something like registering a new product or signing up for a new service, there’s always the chance that your email will be misused by that company. Encourage your child to use a secondary or disposable email address for these purposes. If that company starts spamming and refuses to stop, your child can simply cancel that backup email account.

6. Be very careful with online marketing offers: Online marketers frequently use contests, surveys, coupon offers, and other incentives to get users to provide their email addresses and other contact information. It is very likely that an email address will end up on one or more mailing lists and that this email address will end up receiving a lot of unsolicited emails. If your child is going to provide an email address for any type of online marketing effort, make sure it’s a secondary or disposable address.

7. Remove your email address from mailing lists: Remind your child to remove their email address from any mailing list that sends out email they no longer want or need.

8. Follow the rules for school or work-related email addresses: If you or your child has an email address issued by a school or workplace, then that email should only be used for related activities. When schools issue email accounts for students or companies create accounts for workers, their rules generally prohibit the use of email for personal purposes. If you need email for personal use, it should be very, very easy to get an email account from the ISP you use to access the Internet at home or from the many free email account providers online like Gmail and Yahoo.

9. Do not provide your email address: If you have the opportunity to provide an email address, but it is not necessary for someone else to have it, do not provide it. This applies to both online and offline activities.

10 Consider using a fake email address– If someone insists on giving you an email address and you don’t need or want to receive email from them, provide a fake email address or one you no longer use. Obviously, if you have a legal obligation to provide truthful information, you must provide a real address. But for situations like an annoying person at a party who insists on getting in touch in the future, a fake email address will come in handy.

These steps won’t totally solve the spam problem, but if your child consistently follows these tips to keep email addresses less visible, the result will be less time cleaning out junk from the inbox and more time spent doing nicer things online. .

Additional Resources:

Spam.Abuse.net — http://spam.abuse.net

Stop spam here — http://stopspamhere.ca/

Top 10 Ways to Stop Spam — http://www.speedbrake.com/email/nospam.htm