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This week, I’m going to cover the most important things that you can do to prevent spammers from finding the valid e-mail addresses at your organization, also known as e-mail address harvesting. Preferably, these measures will be implemented at the same time that your organization gets on the Internet and starts using e-mail to have the best chance of actually stopping your organization from ever having a spam problem. However, it’s never too late too start, in order to prevent your spam problem from getting worse.

Be discreet with e-mail addresses

One of the most basic measures to help prevent getting a lot of spam is by being discreet. Don’t give your e-mail address out to just anyone. It’s also worth saying that if others have trusted you with their e-mail addresses, you should protect that information.

This post is going to concentrate on business e-mail, but some of these tips may be useful for personal e-mail users as well. With this in mind, the first tip is not to provide your work e-mail address to your friends and family. More than likely your company doesn’t want you receiving personal e-mail at work anyway. If you do share your e-mail address with them, make sure and ask them to follow the rest of the advice in this post.

Don’t use your work e-mail address for shopping online or taking part in other non-work related activities. Although shopping is less dangerous, many of the “free” services and offers online are actually e-mail marketing revenue based services. Other “free” services are likely to be actual scams where the sole purpose is only to gather your e-mail address by professional spammers. I have seen these e-mail address harvesting sites range anywhere from free sweepstakes all the way to sites that promise to e-mail you free alerts on registered sex offenders moving into your area. Sometimes a privacy policy will be very clear, saying that your e-mail address will be shared with “our advertising partners”, other sites lack a privacy policy altogether. If you have the time, always read an organization’s privacy policy, and don’t provide your e-mail address if you’re not completely comfortable with what you read. If you’re at the store, or on the phone, and a vendor asks you for your e-mail address don’t be afraid to ask how it will be used.

Providing your e-mail address to a site that indicates your e-mail address will be shared with the site’s partners is an invitation to endless offers. Even if the partners honor subscription removal requests, the number of partners could be endless. You could find that the company that now has your e-mail address, continually sells your e-mail address to different partners every day.

Never provide a friend or colleague’s e-mail address to a third party. This includes e-cards, and “mail this to a friend” links. Along these lines, when sending a mass mailing out to everyone in your address book, please enter all of the addresses on the blind carbon copy (BCC) line, not the carbon copy (CC) line. In some e-mail clients, you may need to “view all headers” to see the BCC header. Using the blind carbon copy stops everyone in the mailing from seeing eachother’s e-mail address. This is very important because even if you want all of your contacts to be able to e-mail eachother, it’s unlikely that all of the contacts have given you permission to share their e-mail addresses with everyone you know. You may find that some of the contacts will get very upset if you do this.

If you have a database of customer or contact e-mail addresses, keep the database secure. Make sure that it is minimally password protected. If your computer gets infected with a virus that scans your computer looking for e-mail addresses to propagate to or to share with a spammer, you’ll have mitigated any damage. You’ll also want to control access to the information. Many information leaks are inside jobs. It’s easy to have a competitor or e-mail marketer bribe one of your employees into secretly sharing your customer database.

The easiest way to remember all of these tips may simply be to concentrate on only sharing your e-mail address with those that need to know it for you to do your job, and reminding others that they should treat your e-mail address as any other personal information. Receiving spam, or even e-mail that is not work related at work can greatly affect your productivity and cost your company money.

Tomorrow’s post will be on e-mail address harvesting, the methods used by spammers to find your e-mail address.

In other news, a spammer reportedly had an alien baby, but odd things tend to happen on April 1 of each year.