We are always trying to stay one step ahead of the spammers by implementing measures on the servers that reject incoming emails that are known to be spam before they even get to you but many billions of spam emails are sent every day on the internet and obviously a number of these will get through.
The best way of cutting down on the amount of spam email that you actually receive yourself, is to follow these steps in relation to your email settings :
1) Dont have your email address in readable format on your web pages - spammers use programs to "scrape" email addresses from web pages to build lists which they then use themselves and also sell on to other spammers. The best way, is to have a clickable link or better still, a clickable image for people to send you an email.
2) Have the default action for emails sent to addresses on your domain that dont exist, set to "Discard with error to sender (at SMTP time)". If you feel that you really want to catch all emails sent to anything@yourdomain then forward them to another email address within your domain rather than to a btinternet, yahoo or aol email address. This will help in the long term in that it will eventually get these email addresses removed from the lists that spammers use. This can be set by logging into your CPanel control panel (see your welcome email for details on how to do this) and then going to the email section and choosing the Default Address option.
3) Common targets for spammers are sales@yourdomain and info@yourdomain as these are the most commonly used email addresses for domains, so unless you really have to use these, then choose something specific to you.
4) Ensure that you have DKIM switched on within your cPanel account - this is done via the "Email Authentication" option within the Email group. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) should always be switched on as this is a means of verifying incoming email. It ensures that incoming messages are unmodified and from the sender from whom they claim to be. This obviously works helps to prevent incoming spam messages.
Obviously ensure you have a good spam filter as part of your anti-virus package running on your PC but also use an email client program that filters out a lot of the spam for you such as Microsoft's replacement for Outlook Express which is called Windows Live Mail. This is a free download from Microsoft (just do a search in google for it, it is simple to download, install and very easy to use) and has lots of built in rules which are updated regularly to filter out most of the spam.
