Slice up your spam with these easy tips

Make life more difficult for spammers during 2008.

You probably spend on average an hour or more each month getting rid of spam e-mail. Here are four tips to cut that out:

“Never respond to a spam message. That generally alerts the spammer that you do exist. Even if you “unsubscribe” from that message, the spammer won’t forget you.

“Never buy anything from a spam come-on message. That will assure you that from that point on, the spam community will keep trying to sell you other products.

“Avoid leaving your actual e-mail address across the Web. Web tools will consistently crawl all sorts of forums and sites; they collect e-mail addresses and provide them to spammers.

“Use anonymous e-mail addresses. Many ISPs, such as Earthlink, give you a number of anonymous addresses. So that lets you sign up at some shopping site with an address that isn’t your primary e-mail. You can take care of the shopping with the anonymous address, but you won’t be sharing your real one with anyone else.