Email box overrun by Spam?

If you are having to wade through SPAM all the time, it may be time to move to another email account. This may seem like a daunting task but here a few steps to take to make your move successful.

Sign up for a new account.

Send an email to everyone in your contacts list with a message about the new email address.

Access any online services that you want to have the new address (survivalmonkey.com, etc.) and make the change

Go into your controls for your old account and set up an autoresponder. If you use Outlook or another desktop based email system, you can find this under tools or something like it. Most web based, Gmail, Yahoo, etc have a similar feature.

Create an autoresponder message that says

This is the important part because spam emails are always sent from garbage email accounts and they won't get the autoresponder message advising of the change. It will give anyone you've forgotten about a chance to upgrade their contacts.

You can keep the old account open if you want and periodically check it for mail that was sent that you want.

If you're like most, you use one email box for everything. Those that have a corporate job have a company email and a personal one. I'm a big fan of free email services because they remain constant even after you move or change your internet service provider. I have not set up an email address with Charter or comcast for that reason.

I have 6 working email address and get zero spam. Not a single unwanted email comes through and I'd know because all 6 accounts come through to my phone.

Why 6? long story but I have separate accounts for different categories of online activity. A few of those accounts change yearly.

I recommend always having a garbage account with gmail or other for any online shopping or forum registrations. That's where the spam comes from and the reason I have so many accounts.

The melbo@ and Admin@ this site accounts got to the point where I was (and still am) receiving 3000 spam mails a day. I changed those around and also have some accounts set up that are just for site business and just for family or friend business.

My wifes email account was associated with real estate and her spam count got so heavy that we just performed the above and she never skipped a beat. I closed the old account around 6 months later. I do the same with my garbage account used solely for online stuff.

 

I have Outlook as my e-mail gadget, which does not have an auto responder built in. However, there are add-ons available that will do the job. There is a free trial, good for 14 days from M$, after that it becomes a pay to play deal.

Oddly enough, my throwaway hotmail account sees almost nothing in the way of junk. I've had both the throwaway and regular for well over ten years.

 

ghrit, try going to the webmail for your service provider. They will usually have an auto responder built in to webmail

 

Thanx, yup they do, and the price is right.

 

Other than my corporate accounts, I like webmail the best. It's always accessible and can easily be brought into Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird as an additional account.

I rarely log in to my webmail accounts with the 'web interface' and instead have them all brought to me on various formats.

 

My webmail has about 30 meg of storage and no auto delete. It imports all into T-bird (on the laptop) and Outlook (on the desk) or both (if I want) and it does capture most spam. I still have to go in and do what one does with junk and anything that has been downloaded.. All in all, I like it well, but that retention feature (everything, downloaded or not) is what will drive me to change addy sometime soon.

 

I think the auto delete is a difference between POP3 and IMAP settings. Have to get with you on a sidebar about that.

I like my webmail to stay synced with my local mail: ie. if i delete on Thunderbird, I want it deleted off the server, etc. I also thought that POP downloaded to your laptop mail client and also deleted off the server.

oh well, brain to pickled from the week to sort out YOUR problems right now...

 

It's POP3, and I can set it to simply download incoming good stuff and delete from server storage. The downside is that once off the server, I can't get it onto the other machine directly (It can be done indirectly by sending the message thru the throwaway account.) Not all that much of a problem, it's the clogging things up with spam and other blacklisted junk that eats storage. The upside of download and delete is saving storage for more of those folks that like sending me 10 meg vids. (I gotta talk to Gary about that ---)

There seems to be no way to auto dump the spam filter, subject to some further snooping around the control panel. Over time, I've ratcheted up the filter setting until it's as tight as a fly's bung and I'm getting no false positives. Auto dumping spam would be a good thing, and an auto forward to dot gov would be better. I'll check with server admin about that next week.

Are you finally off 24/7 call?

 

One of the things that running your own eMail Server allows you to do, is setup a Basic eMail Master Account, and then point a series of Secondary Accounts at the Master Account. Then when one of the Secondaries gets hit with mucho Spam, you just send out one of the other Secondary Account addresses, as your new one, and you do not have to change any of the Master Account information. Then do not delete the old Secondary, but bounce all its traffic back to the sender. After a couple of months, with no new traffic, you can bring it back into the pool of Secondaries. As I live at the far end of a IP Based Sat Link, all my Servers sit on a T3 in my partners basement, in Seattle. My local Server the quires that Server once every 3 minutes, and sucks up any traffic, that has arrived since the last query, over the Sat-Link. If the Sat-Link goes down, due to Wx or something, the email just spools up down there, until the Link comes back up. This system has worked well for "Me" for 15 years, even when my only link was a really glacial dialup. I let the server do the walking, while I do other stuff, and the email loads like it was next door, because it is... Just a thought....