Do you find that whenever you open your inbox there are 476 junk e-mails, 94 SPAM e-mails and 20 really important ones buried in there somewhere amongst all the inbox junk?

These 4 top tips will help you drastically reduce the amount of junk e-mails and SPAM you receive. This will save you having to waste your valuable time dealing with them and allow you to get on with something important instead.

1. Use a contact form

If you have a website or blog, don’t put your e-mail address on it anywhere. Spam bots regularly crawl websites and harvest e-mail the addresses they find there. These are then added to their mailing list automatically: hey presto… bucket loads of SPAM!

Instead, use something like this Contact Form, not an e-mail address on your website or blog.

2. Don’t make your e-mail address public

For the same reason as described above, don’t put your e-mail address in public places on the Internet.

These include:

• Online directories e.g. Yell.com
• Blog comments
• Online forums
• social networking sites

3. Use a dedicated e-mail address for subscriptions

Whenever you subscribe to newsletters, mailing lists and websites in general, always use an e-mail address that you ONLY use for subscribing e.g. signup@yourdomain.com or signupyourname@hotmail.com.

This way, all signup related e-mails will go to a separate inbox. If for some reason you still want them to go to your main inbox just set up e-mail forwarding in your e-mail software. Then it will just be a case of checking the “To” field to identify and separate them.

4. What if you’ve already got a junk e-mail/SPAM problem?

Change your e-mail address and tell anyone who needs to know including any subscriptions you want to maintain – simple.