Jul 27 2004
Do you know why you get so much spam?
Back in the day, when we were freely giving out our email address on all those websites, that eventually, they’d proliferate that address to all the scumbag emailers on earth. I’m blogging this. Seriously, friends. I hear a lot of griping from people that email sucks these days. Sure it does. A solution is to use a new email address for a while, and NOT use the one that you may have been used to from years and years of use. Those years and years of use have probably “dirtied” the address for a while.
Actually, Jesse is using a new address. I wonder if he’ll comment and let us know if it’s worked out for him. There are also solutions like www.mailblocks.com, a system that uses a challenge > response system. If someone emails you, it asks them to verify that they are human, your friend, etc. If it passes, then MailBlocks will send mail your way. If they don’t reply to the validation email from MailBlocks, and they aren’t on your pre-approved list, you won’t get the mail. It’s that simple. There are also email services like Google’s GMail, which is probably getting close to being released to the general public. That probably works very well against spam, if they do mail like they do searching (except for yesterday!).
5 Responses to “Do you know why you get so much spam?”
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I use COTSE (cotse.net). They do all the mail for my entire domain, and they rock. $5.95 a month.
I tried mailblocks, but didn’t like it. Kludgy interface, slow site, IE support only, and you still had to go through your spam box every day or so and look for false positives.
Forgot to say…using COTSE, I didn’t have to change my email address.
Worked great for me. There is the initial hassle of sending out your new email address to people, and there is the occassional friend that didn’t get it, but it was worth not getting the 50ish spam messages per day that I was having to deal with.
Some new spam is starting to trickle in now, since I used my actual email account (kinda stupid) to sign up for a beta test.
The bottom line is never give your email account to anyone you don’t know, or to an organization. If you want to sign up for magazines, games, etc. create an email account made specifically for that, and watch the spam trickle in.
Love,
Jesse
I don’t mind deleting 200 extra emails a day. I give my right index finger an extra 3 minutes work out each morning.
I actually sent an email to someone (work related) and got that “please reply that you are a human and I will send this on…” email! it was cool! Once I clicked on the link it sent me ANOTHER email letting me know that my original email was sent!