spam spam spam spam
By Toby Allen
Thursday, September 05, 2002
Glorious Spam ! Wonderful Spam!
I set up my hotmail account in 1998 on route to Australia with my Cousin. We needed way to keep in touch. I had email at university and with my dialup accounts but never a personal email address available from anywhere. It was new and exciting, and I set it up at a time when you could still get your name as your email without any extra digits or nonsense on the end.
For years I would reel of my Hotmail address to people. It was a mark of my manhood. I have a hotmail account and its actually my name. I checked it on a regular basis, kept in touch with friends, accepted the rules and didnt complain too bitterly when I once lost all my emails for not checking my inbox after a friend had sent me a 1.5 MB email.
It began slowly at first. The odd "Penis Englarging Gel", "I knew you in Timbuktu", "Cheaper loans than you can imagine". Nothing major, actually quite amusing."Look what I got sent today in my inbox. Pill to make my Penis grow by 12 Inches. Isnt that funny".
But soon it became less than amusing. We were all getting 15 - 20 emails a day. Much Much more if you were unlucky. Hotmail responded to this new menace and introduced the Junk Mail folder. If you switched on your Junk Mail Filter Hotmail tried (quite successfully) to filter junk mail to a particular folder, but it only got some of it, and it was put in a folder where it would sit for up to 30 days and take up space. This was so as you could see if it had got it wrong.
I very quickly decided I no longer cared if it got it wrong, I just wanted rid of the junk mail. For Months emails arrived were deemed Junk Mail and sent straight to the Trash. I lived days without ever seeing what Junk Mail I was getting. Except I didnt. There would still be 5 - 10 emails a day that I knew were Junk but the filter didnt catch. Sigh - I could live with that.
I did. I lived with it for a long time. Junk Mail Filter killing most of the spam on arrival, I just deleted the rest each time I logged in. Kept it managable. I did that for a good couple of years. I had to. How could I change my email address. I have been using it for too long.
There are plenty of reasons to change email addresses. When the pain of wading through 35 emails to find 2 emails from your friends or business associates, outweights the pain of missing the email, its time to change.
However this left me with another problem. Wouldnt simply having another email address mean that it would begin to build up spam. Yes and No. I use the "entire domain to myself" approach
This works becuase
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Domains are hideously cheap now £8.99 for a .com per year £2.99 for a .co.uk domain per year.
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Companies such as 123-reg provide you with email (and web) forwarding.
Now that I have registered a domain where all mail to that domain is forwarded to whatever email address I like (I use my NEW yahoo account), I can use one email address for all my shopping requests, an email address for all the php stuff I do, an email address for all the delphi stuff I do etc. and if I think a company who wants my email address is dodgy, I can give them a silly email address such as yourcompanyname@mydomain.com . Now if one of these email addresses becomes compromised, I can filter it off to the trash (I've already had to do this for one address on my domain that I used when working for someone). But all my friends can still send me mail.
Aside from the reduction in spam, its kinda cool to have your own domain. So do it today. Its happening slowly, but I'm informing my friends and colleagues that my email address has changed, continuing to check my hotmail, but not send from it and reply to any emails telling of my new address. Soon enough I'll be able to switch on the "address book only" filter in hotmail and be rid of spam forever (hmm but what about all those companies that have my hotmail account as a login!!!! - What if I forget my Password?).