HOW TO ESCAPE FROM E-MAIL SPAM, SOME E-MAIL SPAM AND MORE E-MAIL SPAM!!!!! FOR DUM-DUMS!

All my life Spam meant my favorite canned salted meatloaf. I remember the first time I got an e-mail that warned me about Spam a few years ago, and I thought why? Is there some sort of food poisoning happening with Spam meat? For those of you non-internet or non-email savvy newbies, Spam refers to the old school term, “junk mail”.

You can find all sorts of advice on Spam’s technicalities, and maybe a hundred ways of how to stop it or fight back, but what I will tell you now is the layman’s way of how to prevent Spam. Maybe if you were a techie you would have the time to analyze every bit and way Spam works, and even how to Spam back, but not everyone can do that. Majority of us just want to go about our normal routines without having to face hundreds of e-mails selling you different medicines, or ways of how to be a more godly endowed man, or techniques on getting rich quick, etc.

Just like fighting crime, the best thing to do is to practice prevention. If you don’t want your valuables to be stolen, remove them from curious eyes and keep them in a safe place. Of course the best defense is offense, but let’s save that for a future blog. Now I’ll teach you how to be a lover, not a fighter.


PREVENTION PREVENTION PREVENTION

FIRST: CREATE AT LEAST 2 E-MAIL ADDRESSES, one for friends and one for signing up on the internet. Choose from one of the free providers like Yahoo Mail or Google’s Gmail. There are many other free e-mail providers out there and I encourage you to use them if you wish, but I have no experience with their anti-spamming capabilities. Personally, I have about 8 Yahoo addresses, and about 10 Gmail ones, and I prefer the look and feel of Yahoo, but Gmail I think has better anti-spamming security.

When you separately categorize your e-mails for Friends, Romance, Business, Acquaintances, Family, Internet Sites, etc, you are actually using your main e-mail address and filtering incoming mail into separate folders or menus. The way I do it is I use a separate e-mail address for each category. For example, an e-mail address for Friends, another one for my office, another one for my acquaintances, etc. This way, if ever spam finds out that one of my addresses exist and I decide to junk it and make a new one, I don’t have to notify all my contacts, just the ones in the address that’s infected with Spam.

With this style, you have to have at least one address just for signing into websites. You can get Spam infection by signing for web services, or buying stuff online, or through infected contacts who have your e-mail address in their address book. That Internet only e-mail address should be used with all your web service signups, and it doesn’t matter if you get thousands of Spam a day in that address, because you know it’s just for that anyway.

By the way, clicking on a spam’s link that says “If you want this notification to stop, click here”, will only ask for you to enter your e-mail address. Well, this doesn’t work, actually you’ll get even more spam after doing this, because you have confirmed that you really do exist and that’s what they want. Also, using some mail client services like sending a fake Mail Not Delivered message does not stop spamming, because they know you replied back. Spam bots can’t read, they just know that you replied and that’s all they need to keep going on and continue to include you in their spam list.

SECOND: BEING SENT AN E-CARD OR ELECTRONIC GREETING CARD IS ANOTHER WAY TO LET SPAMMERS KNOW THAT YOUR ADDRESS EXISTS, so if you have friends who have the habit of giving your e-cards, politely tell him or her that you’d rather not receive any e-cards. This is true for other invites that you receive from friends for an assortment of services like free phone calls, or whatever. In this case let your friends know that you have an INTERNET only address, and if they want to invite you to join something they’re already part of, have them send it to that address instead of your Friends only one.

THIRD: IF YOU MUST SIGN UP ON A SITE WHERE YOU KNOW YOU MIGHT NEVER HAVE TO SIGN UP MORE THAN ONCE, like if you’re required to give your e-mail address before you can download a driver, or a manual, or similar file, you can use free services like the Mailinator, at http://mailinator.com. Mailinator gives you a free temporary e-mail address that deletes itself after a while. Enough time for you to receive whatever you need so you can access the site you want. You can get a free Mailinator e-mail address without any need to sign up or leave your real e-mail address, so if the site you want to connect to is infected with a Spam bot, you don’t have to fear because the Mailinator address you give is not connected to your personal e-mail address.

FOURTH: IF YOU NEED A MORE PERMANENT ADDRESS FOR SITES THAT REPEATEDLY CHECK YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS FOR YOU TO CONTINUE RECEIVING THEIR SERVICES, you can try out Spam Gourmet, at http://www.spamgourmet.com. Spam Gourmet provides you with a free e-mail address, but you have to give them your personal e-mail address for it to work. What’s good about Spam Gourmet though is you can configure it to forward to your personal e-mail address a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 20 messages only. So if a Spammer site decided to send you spam, it’s limited to the number of e-mails you assigned Spam Gourmet to receive for you. If you only need 1 e-mail, any mail over the first will never get sent to you. They protect your privacy, so you don’t have to worry because your real e-mail address will never be given out to other parties.

FIFTH AND LAST ADVICE: IF YOU ARE A PERSON WHO RECEIVES THOUSANDS OF SPAM A DAY, and don’t want to go through the hassle of any of the advices I mentioned above, you might want to opt for paid filtering services. I recommend Only My E-mail, at http://onlymyemail.com. They give you several offers, from kids protection for $2 a month, to your personal privacy for $4 dollars a month for 2 e-mail addresses. They even have corporate services which they can quote you for if you ask for it. How this works is you give them your e-mail address or addresses, and they filter them from spam, malwares and viruses before sending your real e-mails to you mailbox. Then you get a regular report on how many spam, malwares or viruses they protected you from. You are also in control, like if there are particular e-mails they filter but you actually wanted to receive, you can allow them to be sent.

Spam is here to stay, and just like drugs there’s no way to fight it. I tried fighting spam for a few years, like I hit them with software that spams back, I also tried the Mail Not Delivered option, and I even went to the point of tracking their URL’s and sending them personal messages and legal warnings. I tried not opening my e-mail address for over a year, and I even tried cancelling that same e-mail account forcing all my e-mail to be truly un-received, and then reinstating it after over 6 months. Guess what, nothing worked, in fact I have even more spam now than before I started fighting back. In my opinion, the best thing you can do is prevention. It’s not worth the effort fighting bots, maybe even thousands of bots worldwide.