Unwanted e-mail includes messages that have malicious software attachments, are part of some kind of fraudulent scheme, or are associated with cyberbullying, online child predators, or other illegal or undesirable activities. There are many kinds of unwanted e-mail, with most sharing one or more of the following traits:

• They make demands on your time and energy, but provide little or no benefit.
• They have unexpected and potentially harmful attachments.
• They are intended to harass, embarrass, or intimidate, the recipient.
• Chain letters, bogus offers, rumours, and other information that lacks authority, usefulness, or validity.
• They encourage visits to websites associated with malicious software, fraudulent activity, or inappropriate content.
• They make unsolicited offers for some kind of commercial product or service.

As long as your child has an active e-mail address, there will be someone willing to send your child an e-mail he or she does not want to read. While no technique or toll can get rid of all unwanted e-mail, you can help your to child reduce the chance that someone sends unwanted e-mails by taking the following steps to make his or her e-mail address less visible online or offline:

1. Choose mailing lists carefully: Encourage your child to join only mailing lists that send out useful and worthwhile information Also, your child should only join mailing lists that have an easy procedure for removing an address.
2. Avoid having an e-mail address published online: If your child has to put an address on a web page, use a secondary or throwaway address that can be cancelled if it starts to get too many unwanted e-mails.
3. Make it hard for a machine to read an e-mail address: There are many "e-mail harvesting" programs that automatically search for e-mail addresses on web pages, blogs, and other locations online. These addresses are then sold in bulk so that businesses can then send unsolicited e-mail to unwilling recipients. One way to make it harder for these automated e-mail-gathering programs to read the e-mail address is to add a space after and before the "@"sign in the address. A human would have the good sense to remove the blanks, but a program would not. Another way is to display the e-mail address in a graphic rather than with text.
4. Don't volunteer to receive e-mail: During the registration process, many online services like e-mail accounts or social networking sites ask if you want to receive product updates, newsletters, or other information by e-mail. If this happens, the safest option is to decline. If your child does decide to receive this kind of e-mail, only allow it if the site makes it easy to get taken off a mailing lists.
5. Use a secondary e-mail address for administrative purposes: Anytime you do something like register a new product or sign up for a new service, there is always the chance that your e-mail will be misused by that company. Encourage your child to use a secondary or throwaway e-mail address for these purposes. If that business starts to send unsolicited e-mail and refuses to stop, then your child can simply cancel that backup e-mail account.
6. Be very careful with online marketing offers: Online marketers frequently use contests, surveys, coupon offers, and other enticements to get users to provide their e-mail addresses and other contact information. It is very likely that an e-mail address will end up in one or more mailing lists and that this e-mail address may end up receiving many unsolicited e-mails. If your child is going to provide an e-mail address for any kind of online marketing effort, make sure that it is a secondary or throwaway address.
7. Remove your e-mail address from mailing lists: Remind your child to remove her e-mail address from any mailing list that sends mailings she no longer wants or needs.
8. Follow the rules for school or work related e-mail addresses: If you or your child has an e-mail address issued by a school or workplace, then that e-mail should only be used for related activities. When schools issue e-mail accounts to students, or businesses create accounts for workers, their rules typically prohibit use of the e-mail for personal purposes. If an e-mail is needed for personal use, it should be very, very easy to get an e-mail account either from the ISP you use for accessing the Internet at home, or from the many online providers of free e-mail accounts like Gmail and Yahoo.
9. Do not volunteer your e-mail address: If you have an opportunity to provide an e-mail address, but it is not necessary for someone else to have it, then don't provide it. This goes for online activities as well as for offline activities.
10. Consider using a fake e-mail address: If someone insists on being provided with an e-mail address, and you have no need or desire to receive e-mails from this person, then provide either a fake e-mail address or one that you no longer use. Obviously, if you have a legal obligation to provide truthful information, then you should provide a real address. But for situations such as an annoying person at a party who insists on getting in touch in the future, a fake e-mail address will be very useful.

These steps will not totally solve the unwanted e-mail problem, but if your child were to consistently follow these tips for keeping e-mail addresses less visible, the result will be less time spent clearing junk out of the inbox and extra time spent doing more enjoyable things online.

Another way that spam advertisers can access your details is through forum sites and mailing lists. This is why keeping your e-mail address private is so important. Remove your email address from mailing lists and change your privacy settings on forum sites to protect yourself from spam. These spam advertisers harvest your information from forum contact lists. Remove your details from these lists and remove the risk.

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