The headache of spam

[techboy]

If you're like me, you must receive a lot of unsolicited emails daily. Your legitimate emails are buried somewhere within the dozens or hundreds of spam mail. What this means is that you are forced to carefully sift through the spam looking for the real ones. Think of the amount of time you waste daily doing this.

The fact of life is, as long as you decide to keep using email, spam would not be far behind.

People have come up with all kinds of ways to fight spam, but the problem persists. The most notable effort is filters employed by ISP's to determine if a piece of mail is spam. Unfortunately, even genuine emails get caught in these filters.

In light of this problem, an idea occured to me the other day, that if I gave each person I know a different email address, then it becomes easy to identify the source of any spam that I receive.

For example, I know Audu, Bolaji, and Chinedu. Instead of giving all of them my single email address, I decide to give them each a different email address. That way, if spam starts to arrive from one of those addresses, I know who it's from. I can then cancel that address without affecting everybody else's ability to email me.

What do you guys think of that?

[Richard Akindele]

techboy, what you are suggesting is a great idea. It's not a new thing though. The technical term for it is: [b]Disposable e-mail addressing (DEA)[/b]. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_e-mail_address

Basically, you give each person you know a different email address. You then forward all messages sent to those email address to your single email address.

DEA can be a higly effective step against spammers, but it does have its downside. You probably have figured it out also. The downside has to do with responding to messages.

Let's say you give 50 people 50 different email addresses. All messages from those 50 addresses will be forwarded to your real email address. The whole idea is to conceal your real email address from people. But what happens when you need to reply to messages?

If you send replies from your private email address, the address would be revealed, thereby defeating the whole purpose. That leaves you with one option, login to 50 different email accounts to send replies! Yikes!!

[techboy]

Good thinking. Yes I agree with you that replying to messages can become a headache. However, it may not necessarily be a major problem if one only receives a couple of emails daily, or even weekly.

I receive on average 5 emails daily that are legitimate, and not all of them need responses. The remaining 1,000+ emails that land in my mailbox are pure spam.

So, with DEA, I'll only need to login to a maximum of 5 email accounts daily to send a reply. I think it's worth the effort in a bid to combat spam.

The most interesting aspect of DEA is that, once a particular account becomes compromised by spammers, I can simply cancel that account and would only need to inform a single person about it.