Once you are receiving spam it’s hard if not impossible to stop it coming to you, all you can do is ignore it (block it). But there are ways to reduce the amount of spam you get before it starts coming in.

It’s best to keep your email address off the internet, (eg off any web pages) as there are web crawlers searching every website for email addresses to put on lists and sell to spammers.

Once your email is out there and on someone’s spam list there’s no way to stop it spreading, so you will probably get an ever increasing amount of spam.

I would suggest if you have a spam problem:

1. Change your email addresses.

2. If you must have a ‘contact email’ on a webpage then get two email addresss, one that you keep very private that you give to your friends and family, and then public webpage one one that you can have forwarded to your private one, but try to change the web page one every year or so when it collects spam. (eg info@dpc.org.au, dpc@dpc.org.au, contactus@dpc.org.au etc.)

3. Get your ISP to turn on spam filtering. (This is better than the email filtering within apple mail because all the spam emails are blocked BEFORE they are downloaded to your computer.) There are various levels of spam filtering, some very aggressive and will block most spam, but also the occasional real email. Ask you ISP about spam filtering.

4. Gmail has the best spam filtering I have found.

Not only does this save space, it can also stop the files getting messed up on the email journey they are about to embark upon. If you compress a folder, the folder and all the files appear when it is ‘unzipped’. This is built into Macintosh OSX. Here is how to do it.

1. Here is the folder we want to zip.

2. Right Click on the folder, and a menu will appear, select Compress (if you have Leopard) or Create Archive (if you have Tiger or older) .

3. It will make a zip file that you can then drag into apple mail or onto a thumbdrive to give to someone else. All you have to do is double click on the zip file it and it will ‘uncompress’ and you will have the original file or folder appear!