Spam is a really serious problem today, millions of spam messages are being sent every hour in the Internet, that is why it is unfortunately natural to receive an email like that from time to time. However, there are still things that you can do. On your side there is active protection (usually done after receiving spam) and passive protection (before that).

Active protection is the easiest one. When you see an email that is clearly a spam you mark it as spam in your webmail client. This procedure is different for every mail provider. What it does is basically lets the mail provider know that this message is spam and that messages like that should not be let into your inbox. Basically in this way you simply help your email provider to fight off hordes of spam, which most of them do actually very well, as there are tons of email spam that you never see in your inbox, but which have been sent. As to my knowledge Gmail has rater good protection and they are evolving constantly. If you let me know which mail service provider you have I can provide more information on how to mark mail as spam.

The passive protection is much harder to implement as it require constant awareness, but is much more effective. The secret is that spammers can only send you email when they know your email address and there are only so few places where they can get it. So make sure that you:

• never allow your email to appear as text or mailto link on your website
• your email is not publicly visible on your social network profiles
• you do not use your primary email to register on shade websites (by shady I mean any non-major places that can be bought out by spammers or hacked or be owned by spammers) – if you need to register on a website like that use an alternative email that you do not use for important stuff
• always think carefully before subscribing to anything with your primary email
• never fill your primary email in any form that can compromise it (for example when replying to a comment on some blog or in other places)

If you feel that your email has been heavily compromised and is receiving tons of spam messages that you do not want to see, you mark them as spam, but for month the picture is not changing, then most likely there is nothing that can be done with that, and you may want to think about changing your email and being much more careful about it. This is not always relevant if your email consists of simple words or your name – firstname.lastname@domain.com, if your name is publicly available or not very rare. In this case you can be pretty sure that even if no one knows your email address, spammers will just guess that a person with such name can have it.