Keeping your address secret
Judging from the response yesterday there are a lot of you already "in the know" when it comes to evading spam. The essence being that you need to be able to juggle multiple email accounts. One for work, one for personal and one for things you don't care about. The first two you keep as secret as possible and the third you hand out in online forms and when you sign up for that chance to win the new car. Personally I take this even further and have two "throw-away accounts". One of them is low risk for things like my bank and Amazon and alike. The other is very rarely checked (and then only to empty it) and the address is used for any form or site I don't like the look of. Basically, if you have no interest in ever hearing from them, give them the one you don't check/care about. For example, you download some shareware to try it out and they insist on knowing your address to mail you a password. Use the throwaway account and login for that one mail if you must.
Still, having practiced this approach for a few years now, I find it's not perfect. Nothing is. Just owning a domain name is enough. I get mail when a new domain is about a week old, addressed to webmaster, sales, admin etc. My conclusion is that it doesn't matter how clever you are. Sooner or later you will start to get spam. This is when you need to start blocking it, as well as trying to avoid it, and this is what I will be talking about come Monday.
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You can subscribe to an individual
Ever seen/tried {Link} ?
E-mail address you make up on the spot and throw away after you use it.
Brilliant! Going back to Tuesday's issue with WebSense who wanted my email address to send me a password to check their thoughts on MY website:
Mailinator to the rescue. I gave them the address jake@mailinator.com, visited mailinator.com, checked email for "Jake" and got the password. Turns out they have me listed as "Information Technology". Sounds about right.
You too can go to the site and check the inbox for "jake", get the password and check any site you like. Assuming you do it in the next few hours before all mail is removed. If you can't be bothered the password is 932185.
Thanks Mike. Going to bookmark this one...
There's another system called Sneakemail, that I find works really well - although it requires a bit of maintenance. You can create a new sneakemail address for every website that asks for your address. You provide them with this address. Sneakemail then forwards all correspondence to your real address. If you are careful about creating a new address for each site, if at any time you start receiving spam from them (or from someone they sold your address to, which you will be able to identify by the sneakemail address the spam is coming to) you can just delete that particular sneakemail address - voila! No more spam from that website or company.
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Also, check out Spamgourmet. It has the auto-generate capability of mailinator, but it's more like Sneakemail, in that it forwards mail to your real address, but you choose how many messages to accept. For example, say I'm promted for an email address at Amazon. I could enter amazon.10.xyz@spamgourmet.com. In this example "amazon" is just an identifier/reminder for me, 10 indicates that 10 messages will get forwarded (after that they just get eaten), and "xyz" is my account (free signup at spamgourmet). You can maintain multiple addresses, and shut them down at will, or reset the message count, or even designate them as "trusted senders" which become unlimited.
If you don't mind the unusual email address format, it's a pretty cool service.
Jake, if you use Domino as your inbound mail server i'll even give you a free copy of no.Spam.domino .. it's better than a George Foreman grill and it's cheaper too - oh yeah and there are no add-ins or server tasks and it has a bayesian mail rule.. (thinks i've been watching too much late night tv).. it doesn't grill sausages - just spam.
Jake - I use a number of DNS blacklists on the Domino server, as well as forwarding all of my inbound mail through Spamcop. To do this, you have all of your valid email addresses set up on a single user, whose email is set to forward to Spamcop. Then you set up Spamcop to forward your mail back to a secret account only you know about.
This has reduced my spam by about 95%, and it only costs $3/mo.
I am using always the [url={Link} email address [/url]service from [url={Link} .
myTrashMail.com is pretty simple and streightforward. No password or prior signup is need. I telling you this sign up's are a hassel itself! So you account is created on the fly with myTrashMail.com
I use myTrashMail.com daily. Its even faster than a web based login at Hotmail.
You even can make a shorcut bookmark like: [url=http://www.mytrashmail.com/myTrashMail_inbox.aspx?email=test]{Link}
I am using always the fake email address service from www.myTrashMail.com.
myTrashMail.com is pretty simple and streightforward. No password or prior signup is need. I telling you this sign up's are a hassel itself! So you account is created on the fly with myTrashMail.com
I use myTrashMail.com daily. Its even faster than a web based login at Hotmail.
You even can make a shorcut bookmark like: [url=http://www.mytrashmail.com/myTrashMail_inbox.aspx?email=test]{Link}