You know the feeling – Every time you join a program, or sign up to a site, they want your email address to ‘keep in contact’ with you, and , quite often, send latest newsletters, offers and information – not to mention invite you to join / sign up to another program.
The problem is every time you share your email address with someone else you increase the potential for being spammed.
Contrary to popular perception, you DO want to remain in contact with these companies, but still retain control over your email.
So what can you do to protect yourself? The simplest answer to many people, especially given the vast number of free email service providers, is to use a ‘disposable’ email address to confirm the sign up, and never return to afterwards. This solves the problem of people getting hold of your ‘personal’ email address and filling it with unwanted emails.
The problem is that this is actually potentially storing up a time-bomb for future misery, and possibly even financial loss.
Why? Because this is the only “authorised” point of contact the company has with you!
- If you forget your password, where will the company send the reminder?
- If you need to discuss your account, where will the company send the information?
Correct – to that ‘disposable’ email address!
Plus, many companies now require members to maintain a “working” email address. By “working” they mean one that:
- does not have an auto-responder when they send you information
- does not send back a “can not deliver email” message because the mailbox is too full, or does not exist at all
- does not send back a “I have an anti-spam system that requires you to confirm your identity” message.
Put simply – when they send you an email, they do not want to get any automated response from your email account!
So, we return to the question – What can you do to protect your email account from being spammed, and yet still maintain ‘contact’ with the company?
There are 3 possible solutions, which for maximum effectiveness can be combined.
- Use a ‘public’ email address which you then forward to a private email address to actually read and reply to – for maximum efficienciency set the “from” address to match the public email address if you download the email, or reply from the public email address if using web-mail. If necessary, you can delete unwanted emails periodically to keep the account clean.
This means that if a company abuses your email address, it can be blocked at the public address keeping your private address secure.
- Use advanced mail filtering rules to filter incoming mail by both to and from address – so if the ‘correct’ sender does not send mail to the ‘correct’ address it gets blocked. The only real drawback is that initially when signing up to a new company their email will be blocked until you can add their details to your mail filters, and if you are dealing with a large number of companies it can slow down mail delivery as each company will have to have its own filter rule, and it can take longer for all the additional rules to be checked before the mail is passed.
- Use a spam filtering service to process your incoming emails, and forward the ‘cleaned’ emails to you. Remember, that many companies will penalise you if they receive ‘spam check’ responses; so either disable challenge responses when signing up, or if you know the email address / domain that the email will come from add this first to the spam service.
- Do NOT add the sender to your email provider spam list, unless you are sure what this really means – see Tim Lindens post for why this is a BAD idea.
As I said earlier, combining these methods can vastly reduce the unwanted email you have to check.
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