People tell me about the trouble they are having with SPAM. I give them a blank look and a shrug and say “what’s SPAM?”.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people seem to be completely unaware that giving your main email address to commercial organisations is a very bad idea.
Even if you give your main email address to a seemingly reputable organisation, what happens when they are bought-out by a company which is less ethical? They may sell their email list to other organisations for cash. And then once the new outfit has your email address, you have lost the game. Game over. You will be flooded with SPAM emails and will find it almost impossible to get back to a sane situation again.
So, I’ll say this only once: Never, never, never give your main email address to any commercial organisation.
I hear you say, “But I have to give my email address on all these web pages, so what can I do?”
So how do you avoid SPAM then?
- Create a “junk” email address with one of the big companies like yahoo or google etc. I avoid Hotmail like the plague as Microsoft seem to sell your email address faster than sh1t off a shovel once you’ve signed up. So then, let’s assume you have now created a junk email account called johnnyboy@yahoo.com
- Now create an intermediary between any commercial organisation and your new johnnyboy@yahoo.com email address. Do this by going to http://www.spammotel.com. There you need to give an email address that you wish spammotel to forward emails to. So, give your new johnnyboy@yahoo.com email address.
- Once you have created an account with spammotel, test it out by generating a new email address. Spammotel asks you the text you wish to associate with the new email address. I choose some text that reminds me of the organisation to who I will be giving this generated email address to. So if I’m filling a webpage on, for example, www.oracle.com, I’ll just enter “oracle” as the text to associate with the new generated email address. Next click on the create button and spammotel will generate an email address of the form “ZXERTQRTSY@spammotel.com”. Give this generated email address to the form on the website asking for your email address.
- If oracle, or whichever organisation you give the generated email address to, sells your email address you simply log into spammotel and delete the email address. End of SPAM. Period. Nice, huh? Now you’re back in control of your email again 🙂 You will know who sold your email address because the text (“oracle” in my example) will be forwarded in all emails sent to the address.
- If the commercial organisation decides to increase the frequency of their monthly email to daily, or they decide to add you to several of their internal mail distribution lists, no problem, just log into spammotel and delete the email address. End of SPAM. Period.
A good friend told me about the spammotel system a few years ago and I never receive any SPAM to my main email accounts because of this approach. Everyone I have explained spammotel to has loved it. Hopefully you will find it useful too. Enjoy 🙂