I’ve had several friends and family members recently ask me what to do about the flood of spam they receive in their e-mail. Here is my advice: don’t let the spammers get your e-mail address. 🙂
To that end, everyone needs (at least) three e-mail accounts:
- Personal Account – this is the e-mail address you give to your friends and family, where you receive real e-mails from real people you know. Guard this address carefully and never, never use it for any online sign-ups, purchases, etc.
- Business Account – this is the e-mail address you use for your business dealings. Don’t let your friends send you e-mail at this address, make them send to your personal account instead. You will eventually change jobs, companies, etc. and you don’t want your friends to keep sending to this address when that happens. Also, you may get job offers and such from friends – it’s best not to have that in your business account at all.
- Throw-away Account – this is the e-mail address you use to sign up for an online service, place an online order, sign an online petition, etc. This account should be with a free service like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. Over time, you’ll start getting spam at this address – that is the point. You get the spam here instead of in your more permanent accounts. When the spam gets too great (Yahoo Mail and Gmail do a decent job with their filters in my experience), stop using this account and open a new one.
In addition to these accounts, there is a fourth account that can be quite useful: a mailing lists account. If you subscribe to a number of mailing lists, you’ll be very glad that you don’t have them cluttering up the rest of your accounts.
Also of note, never put any of your e-mail addresses on any web page unless you’re trying to get spam.
Your personal email address is only as strong as your friends’ or family members’ addressbook… Some friends of mine subscribed to sms.ac, and their Hotmail account address book has been stolen and everyone in there got spammed.
Needless to say about all these virii that infect your friends’ Outlook and propagate themselves into your “personal” mailbox 🙁
Now I just rely on multiple layers of spam/virus filtering, and acknowledge that it is all part of life.
Definitely – no matter what you’ll have to replace your personal address over time as well.
Ehhhh, I just have the one address anymore. I just let tools I have on my end help me filter out the crap; having one collection point, rather than three, allows me to be more efficient in handling my email.
Now, I do have a second email address for business purposes, but it’s owned by my employer, and I only use it on their time.
4. Or just get SimpleFilter (www.simplefilter.com) for your email accounts and you don’t have to worry about 1,2,3. Sorry about the plug Alex but I read your blog all the time and figured this might be something you’d want to try out.
Geof – collection point != account. Having one collection point is great, but having an e-mail address you can just kill is great too. 🙂
Tim A – I know about spam filters and I use them (bayesian server side and latent semantic analysis client side), but spam load can easily overload a filter. If you are getting 1000+ spam messages a day and 30 real messages a day, the odds of spam getting through any filter and real messages getting accidentally caught is quite high. It also makes it hard to find the false positives.
It doesn’t do any harm to take a few simple steps to avoid as much spam as you can in the first place.
No intention to take away any credit… but that’s exactly what I advised you to do many months ago.
Could this have influenced you?
I’ve had this set up since 1998 actually, but great minds think alike.
I get a very low amount of email, so I can stick to one email address. I don’t work for a business, so I’m safe with nobody else having access.
I use this address when signing up for all online things, and only get a small amount of spam, which is all cought by Mail.app. (So far it’s had a 100% accuracy rate.)
Famous last words Jeff. 🙂
I don’t like killing addresses. I’ve got a bias against doing it. I know, understand, and respect why people do it, but I just don’t like doing it if I don’t have to do it.
That was a fast response. Surprised it was already updated in my Newsreader.
I love Yahoo’s “address guard” feature. A lot of people don’t use it, nor do they talk about it…but I thin it kills 2 birds with 1 stone (nothing against birds of course).
I’m with Geoff on using tools rather than multiple email addresses.
Sure I have a work and a personal account, but I don’t plan on ever changing my personal account (been using it for close to six years) and use it for plenty of e-commerce activities.
Say I pre-order something on Amazon and want to be reminded when it comes out. If I change throw-away accounts, I might not be checking that old account anymore. Or I want to use the ’email me my password’ reminder feature if I can’t get into an account, I’d have to remember which one I used. I count on email reminders to tell me when domains expire too.
I simply don’t want to have to remember to have to go to multiple webmail locations to check for important emails. Sure, I have a Gmail account, but even that forwards to my personal account.
The filtering that my mail provider (fastmail.fm) does is rock solid. Two or three times a day, I spend 15 seconds scanning through my Junk Mail folder to check for false positives (very rare), before I trash them. I’d say I get around 1-200 spam mails a day now. That’s time I’m willing to trade for keeping a single personal email address.
To each their own of course…
100-200 can grow to 1000-2000 in a very short time and without any control on your part, that is the problem. There are manageable levels of spam and unmanageable levels of spam – tools work great on the former.
There are throw-away accounts out there that allow POP or IMAP access, use your tools there to centralize your e-mail checking. 🙂
Not a plug, just a really useful site for your #3 (Throw Away) email.
Check out http://www.mailinator.com
I use it almost everyday. Saves me from getting tons of spam to my real email addresses.
my 2 cents.
I used to do that, but my SPAM account was (stupidly) with Hotmail… when I switched to Gmail i found that the SPAM filter is so good that it doesn’t matter what gets sent to it, i have barely received any spam… i still keep a separate personal address… but I can check my Gmail and actually find real email if there is any just fine
What makes you think your Gmail account won’t have the same amount of spam as your Hotmail account over time?
I’m all for using a throw-away account that has good spam tools, it means you can use the account longer. The point is that you *can* throw that account away when/if you need to.
Alex, I have to admit I use multiple accounts and throw away accounts but like Joost I don’t plan on every changing my main accounts that I’ve been using for many many years. So I filter them through SimpleFilter. I have 1000 or more email filter through it a day and I have no issues with false negatives or positives. I have about 10 spam I scan a day and rarely find a false positive. We’ve setup SimpleFilter to work a bit differently than your typical filter so it manages these issues one has with filters very nicely I think.
Managing Your E-mail
Alex King suggests that you should have three e-mail accounts, possibly four. His logic is pretty sound, and frankly, what he says is common sense.
Without stealing Alex’s thunder, here’s the short form:
Personal Account
This is the account …
Disposable addresses can be obtained from SPANGOURMET.COM
if you have not tried thee give them a go.
It will allow you to crete as many alias’s as you need.
The mails will be good only for 1 to 20 replys (Set by you) and then all mails to that account get trashed.