Email Adress and Spam

[maxim]

Because I'm getting an increasing amount of spam via the email adress I created specifically for this forum (that makes nearly 100% of all messages I'm getting from it) - and only from North American spammers who want's to inform me about special North American products available for everybody living in North America - this adress will become invalid very soon, and I will not expose my email adress anymore.

Everybody who want's to talk to me via email, and doesn't have my standard communication adress yet, should therefore send me a short PM, asking for it.

maxim

[Brendan]

Can you give details about what the spam is like so we could compare it to the spam we get? I get a few pieces of spam sometimes with my main email, which I used for this forum.

[Don. Edwards]

I for one can affirm what is going with Maxim and a few others I am sure. Ever since the hacking of the Celestia forum back in November I have had a 100 fold increase in junk e-mail. It gets so bad some days I am tempted to shut down that e-mail address altogether. I am averaging 25 to 30 a day and on others I am getting between 50 and 75. I keep reporting them as junk mail but it doesn't do a bit of good. MSN's junk filter is a piece of @#$%% , you choose the superlative of your choice. The only reason I have left the e-mail address open is for the correspondence with a few clients interested in my work for professional use. I suppose another avenue is that my E-mail address is posted on Earth Central and the Hub sites. Needless to say as soon as I can that e-mail address will be going down.
So I also recommend that if you wish to converse with me you do so the Private Message system here in the forum. I may let a few select people have my other email address if I know them well enough. Also I have noticed that only every other e-mail I send through MSN is getting delivered. So if you have emailed and I haven't responded that is a possible reason or I simply never got the message as that to has been happening as well.

Don. Edwards

[maxim]

Can you give details about what the spam is like so we could compare it to the spam we get? I get a few pieces of spam sometimes with my main email, which I used for this forum.

Difficult, because I don't keep it. And as my adress already changed, I don't get more of it.

But in general, it had been american style full names or nickname-like ones, american style subjects about mortgages, cheap prizes, credits, applications, approvals, ... .I think that these could penetrate my providers spam-filters because they had a unusual form, compared to the usual spam that floats around here in europe.

If you like to track down yourself from where you get how much spam, there is a general approach:

Either get a set of email-adresses from public email services like gmx, web, msn or what else is easily usable from your area, and forward incoming mail to your common email account. Or, better, if you have a good provider or some webspace - even free one - you usually get at least one email-adress and a unlimited number of aliases (that is, virtual email-adresses that are all collected into your one real one).

Then use one distinct email-adress or alias for every forum, service or registration form you visit. Having your local spam filters well configured - or sorted them out by hand into a special folder - you can use some additional sorting filters provided by every email program, to put the spam into different subfolders, depending on the 'TO' field (the recipient adress).

This way you can quickly get an overview which one are the most 'spam-collecting' adresses and - if you remember it - where you used them.

maxim

[greenwood]

Theres a free service that does a lot of what maxim was talking about...email aliases that expire after a set number of emails

check out http://www.spamgourmet.com/