With all our web site forms, as well as e-mail addresses that have been scattered all over the Internet, spam has been a major headache around the shop for years. My personal account was getting 4,500 spams a month, and my various spam filters simply couldn’t keep up. It had come down to a ‘fix it’ or ‘change the address’ scenario. I took the fix it route, and a simple one at that – using G-mail as a spam filter. Google, the folks behind G-mail, have built a set of very effective spam filters that you can utilize to rid your mail of most of the crap headed your way. Set up a free account and let their filters do the work. You can then have your cleansed e-mail forwarded to whatever ‘real’ address you like. Amazingly simple, and takes minutes to set up. The best thing about G-mail is that you can ‘train’ the filters to recognize what is, and what isn’t spam – keeping ‘false-positives’ down and catching those e-mails that use keyword evading tricks to get under the radar. With all the users ‘training’ Google, the number of spams getting through keeps going down, not up, and even the ’sneaky’ stuff is getting nabbed.
If you want to keep the e-mail account address you already have (and have server access), simply forward incoming mail to your new G-mail account, have it filtered, and then sent back to a ’secret’ e-mail address that you never, never, ever use anywhere (lest it get polluted as well). Best to make this ’secret’ e-mail address a series of random numbers and letters (so that it can’t be found using a spam ‘dictionary’ attack). G-mail’s outgoing mail fields can be set so any outgoing e-mail looks like it’s coming from your original account.
Tres cool.
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