Do you have a spam problem?

edited September 2008 in advice
I don't really; my filters do a pretty good job, and i have throw-away addys that i use for some things, and also email aliases i can use to see who has sold my email address to another business.

but this looks interesting.

OtherInBox
OtherInbox is the email address I use for all the stuff I don't want coming to my main email address - mostly shopping, news and social networking. Pretty much any time I'm not giving my email address to a real person I use my OtherInbox. That way my main Inbox only has important stuff in it and everything else is in my OtherInbox. Once its in there, OtherInbox automatically organizes and everything for me into folders for each website. This saves me time because I can jump right to the messages I care about and easily ignore the ones that I'm not interested in reading right now. It also shows me what's really going on with my email address - if someone sells my information to spammers I know right away and can stop it.

How does it work? Instead of just having one email address, such as jbaer1975@gmail.com, I have unlimited email addresses at my own domain name, josh.otherinbox.com. I don't have to set them up ahead of time, I can just make them up as I go along. I give out a different email address to every website - Amazon gets amazon@josh.otherinbox.com and Facebook gets facebook@josh.otherinbox.com. This way OtherInbox can reliably sort everything coming back into folders. If anyone sells my email address I will know exactly who is responsible and I can Block that one email address so that I never see their emails again. It's powerful!

Comments

  • edited 3:17PM
    mick said......and also email aliases i can use to see who has sold my email address to another business...
    this is far from fool-proof, of course ;)
  • edited 3:17PM
    yeah, you can also ask gmail to add [account name]+[your text here]@gmail.com.. but i've had 2 instances where spammers got past that. they're getting smarter and stripping out a "+" sign isn't hard.
  • edited 3:17PM
    Right before the Olympics i use to receive enormous amounts of spam, during the Olympics it went to zero and after the Olympics it's turned into a a few a day. I use my normal addy for most things, but I check it via google which removes most if not all of the spam. It also makes email easier to view and manage on iPhone :)
  • edited 3:17PM
    most of the trouble i've had stems from places like Amazon and eBay, but i avoid the social networking sites, etc.

    the idea of trying to read email on a little iPhone screen ... dunno, zippie, what i get tends to be long. do you just scroll and scroll?

    the app mentioned above would be fun to use if you got a lot of spam, just to really ID who's selling you out. ;)
  • do you read parchment scrolls instead of books also mick?
  • edited 3:17PM
    emails on iphone are easy to read, most emails i get are usually short. But when I get longer emails i've never had problems being able to read them. Scrolling with your finger is easy :)
  • edited 3:17PM
    i'm not really any kind of Luddite, urb. :D a parchment scroll would be cool (mine would be info-dense, writing every which way and using all the spaces.. a real palimpsest). there's no use for that kind of tool (mobile/iPhone) in my life because there's no mobile tower or satellite that provides a signal here. other side of the island, yeah. here.... nope.

    i've heard about this scrolling with a finger, zippie. mmHmmm... sounds like fun. MMMhhhmmmm.
  • edited 3:17PM
    eek
  • edited 3:17PM
    ah. now.....YOUR problem would be solved by getting a Mac. ;)
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