There you will see when the last login was effectuated, and using which IP address. You can also click on “Details” to see a list of the last logins, their IP address, browser and so on. All you need to do, therefore, is to check if you are really the only person using your Gmail account!

Make sure that you pass on this trick to everyone you know, just everyone. Most common culprits are friends and relatives who might be more interested in keeping track about your activities and the idea of getting caught will keep them away from your Gmail account! Start using all the social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut or Digg to spread the word around – passing the link to this article, telling everyone that you’ll find them out if they tried looking through your Google Mail account.

To avoid spam, ideally users must drop themselves off the mailing lists of any friend or colleague who indulges in forwarding emails to dozens of people collected together in ‘To’ lists. Every time your address is passed around, it opens the door to spammers.

Typical forwarded emails contain pictures, jokes, or e-mails received from others, this is particularly the case between co-workers – the latter risks the whole company e-mail address book getting into the hands of spammers: a fate suffered by many university departments.

You really shouldn’t feel guilty about not forwarding on e-mails, and it is good practice to delete all but critical messages anyway.

However, even though you don’t actively participate in these round-robins, the mere appearance of your address in a list can invite trouble.

Should you need to email a large group of people, then you should use the BCC feature wherever possible, as this prevents spammers getting access to your network of contacts.

It’s also important to delete any propagating list of contacts and email addresses that appear within the body of a received email prior to forwarding it on.

PS: Official emails may be the odd exception in some scenarios, but treat every forwarding decision with care.

If you are planning to start off your own website and need to list your contact email address on the ‘Contact Us’ page of your site, here’s a simple piece of advice.

Ideally you should use techniques listed in Email Best Practice #1. However, should you think that your readers will get confused by using special characters in the listing of your email address, one simple technique is to use picture file of your email address in ‘jpeg’ or another image format. We have listed a couple of samples below.

Most web crawlers don’t have the functionality to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify the text of an email address within such an image.

Unfortunately, this technique is only viable provided you are allowed to upload an image, something that not all blogs, websites and fora allow. Nevertheless, be prepared! So whenever you create a new email account, at the same time produce and save a small image using any of the image editing tools available. The images below were created using Microsoft Paint – an application that comes free with every Windows installation.

WebCoherence has concluded from its experiments that leading Email companies including Gmail (owned by Google), Yahoo Mail (owned by Yahoo) and Hotmail (owned by Microsoft) do NOT gratuitously circulate user email addresses to potential marketeers. It is often the users themselves who invite spam into their mailboxes because of their uninformed actions. WebCoherence, therefore, has recognized the need of educating users so that they improve their internet usage in order to attract less spam.

One of the key reasons for receiving spam is because users leave their email addresses on the public world wide web. They list their email addresses on websites, blogs and fora. These public places on the internet are readily accessible by crawler programs searching for live email addresses. Some companies collect email addresses in this way, selling them on to anyone willing to buy – spawning the spam.

If you wish to avoid spam, it is advisable never to leave your email addresses on the public world wide web. Of course there are times when you need to be contacted, and in such situations it is advisable either to leave a free ‘throwaway’ email address that you discard after having received the required reply, or to use the following format:

username [at] domainname [dot] domain extension

for example: John_Doe [at] webcoherence [dot] org

Or you could use other special characters:

John_Doe +@+ webcoherence +dot+ org

John_Doe {at} webcoherence {dot} org

Recipients find these alternative formats easy to understand, whereas most crawlers will overlook them. Consequently you can expect less spam.