As more of us get 'hooked up' and start settling into our digital communications lifestyle, more people I know are going through a learning curve that for many of us we went through nearly 10 years ago. It's easy to forget this stuff, so when a friend asked me for advice on getting rid of spam, I thought I'd blog it too. Maybe you've got a relative or friend is asking the same question...
This is only one person's experience and opinion - there are others who have different approaches - and you should look at those too, but I offer it here in case it helps (it can't hurt, that's for sure).
The only way really to deal with it when it get to this level is to change your email provider and address. (Her email address was at her broadband providers domain e.g. @tiscali.co.uk, @sky.co.uk)
Certain email domains (i.e. the bit after "@") seem to be quite vulnerable to this. The basic reason is that certain email domains are simply more likely to have lots of real people at the end of them.
This is one of the reasons my wife's old email address was overloaded with spam (junk email), because hers was "@dawson.name" and anything that was a .name was obviously a real person, therefore the spammers think they’re on a good bet.
This applies to a lot of the internet service providers like Tiscali, Virgin Media, Sky etc.
What we have done is register a domain separately from our internet service provider. This provides us with a new email server, from which we download all our email, and the ability to create ‘throwaway’ email addresses that we can use on websites where we’re not sure how they’ll use it.
You can do this with someone like www.register.com (others are available).
Go and find an email domain that is reasonably memorable and meaningful to you.
You then pay to register the domain, and can also buy an email service from them. This is an annual fee (I use the $34.99 ‘pro’ one), and a fee every two years for the domain itself (I think around $60). Obviously this comes on top of your broadband fees, but... it’s only £20 a year. Cheaper than a mobile phone!
They also offer a service where they will register the domain anonymously for you – so they don’t publish an email address that can also be grabbed by the spammers. This costs a couple of dollars extra but I think is worth it, unless you use the hotmail address I suggest below....
After that you can then set up individual email addresses e.g. yourname@mytribe.org
And then it’s a case of keeping your email clean... this means, not putting your email address into websites, not using it on websites that you’re not familiar with or don’t trust, and so on.
It also pays to set up a few email addresses that you can throw away later if you need to. E.g. mynewsletters45@mytribe.org – that you can use when you need to put in an email address, but aren’t sure if it’s that kosher. Then, whenever you find you’re getting a load of email to that address, you can just delete it and all that spam will disappear.
All of these email addresses can be configured to go into your single in-box using a piece of software like Outlook Express. So there’s no hassle about having to go to different sites to check different email accounts.
From Outlook Express you can see to which email address something was sent – so you can start to work out if any of your email addresses has been compromised.
You can also set up different users who can then access their email separately and privately from a different PC or Mac, so you can also set up yourdaughtersname@mytribe.org as well. Or give her a choice of what her user name is. In fact, you should include her in choosing the domain as well – she might thing having her surname in it is not good for example...
She can easily set up her own email on something like hotmail or Google’s Gmail anyway... so my belief is it's best to give her one you have faith in and she believes to be private to her rather than her set one up that you won’t even know about. If you really needed to hack into it at some point, you could because you have all the access details. Whereas if you don’t even know about it...
I also find it pays to have a totally throwaway address that you don’t care if it gets spam. I use a hotmail address – just go to www.hotmail.co.uk and set up anything you like. E.g myname733@hotmail.co.uk
This means that if you need to give an email address to register for a site, and you really think there’s a chance they might be a bit iffy, you can use this one. You can check the account by just going to www.hotmail.co.uk if one of those sites needs you to click on a link in the email to verify it, but otherwise you can just leave it to fester knowing that nothing important will ever get sent to it.
Finally – when you do get spam email, don’t ever reply to it. That will reveal your actual email address – the one you only give out to friends and family and places you trust.
You can also get spam filter plugins for email packages like Outlook that are supposed to recognise spam – but as you point out, the spammers are so clever at constantly changing the way their emails work that I find they’re not very effective. The big online email providers like Windows Live and Google are quite good at this now, but then you have to use their web-based email systems.
I find there’s an advantage in having your email somewhere other than your broadband provider, because then if you decide to switch who your broadband is with, you can do so without changing anything else. Whereas at the moment, if you move away from Tiscali, you will have to change your email address.
I hope that helps...
By the way,.. none of this is guaranteed!