November 14, 2009

SPAM and Email Addresses

Every now and again I have to go and create a new email address. My old addresses get overrun with SPAM, because I'm not good about keeping my private life separated from my online life. These marketers just sell your email address to anybody, who then resell your address to someone else, and so on and so on.

It makes email a pointless way to try to contact anyone for anything important, because your message will just be lost in a sea of hopeless JU$T BUY C14LIS!! crap that's flooding the person's box.

I even have fairly effective anti-spam software that does a fairly good job of separating the wheat from the chaff...but I fear having to pick up my mail after a week of not reading it. I just downloaded 746 email messages, of which I want to read maybe 2. I'll have to filter through about 50 that the filters don't pick up either.

I'm going to change the way that I deal with email. I'm going to create a whitelist for the email that I want to get, and create a filter that dumps it into one folder, and then ignore the Inbox. Email needs to go more the way of how Facebook and other social networks work where you have to befriend someone to send them a message.

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