Email addresses are very important these days; they are an identifier of who we are. Whether it’s your first initial followed by your last name @yourISP.com or if you’ve gotten creative and people now know you as OneHotDancer, our email addresses are very much tied to our identity. There are many spam blocking programs out there and some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide them as part of your account but nasty spam (or unsolicited emails) keep creeping through offering great deals on home businesses or, worse yet, offering something adult related that no one wants to see in their inbox. Once your email address ends up on a few spam lists it is almost impossible to remove yourself fast enough to keep the junk mail from overtaking your inbox. No one wants to login to their email to find they have 250 emails waiting to be read but only 5 are from people you know. Sometimes it seems the only alternative is to change your email address, but then you have to notify all your legitimate contacts of the new way to get in touch with you.
The main way people get your email address to send unsolicited email to is when you sign up for a mailing list, newsletter, or contest. Some people offer these services just to get a large amount of email address to sell to an email marketer. One way to stop spammers from getting your email address and putting it on their mailing lists is by making sure you only give out your email address to people you know. This is sometimes easier said than done. What about when you sign up for a newsletter? What about that contest you want to enter but they require your email address? How about that website you have to register at just to view their content?
The easiest way around this is to setup a second “dummy” email address at one of the many sites out there that provide free email address. Go to their site and register for a free account, make the email address whatever you’d like. If it’s not taken you may even be able to have the same username as the one on your real email account, then only the domain part (everything after the @ sign) would be different. Then, when you find yourself in a position like we spoke of earlier where you need to enter an email address to get access to a site, newsletter, or whatever the reason – you just enter the email address you created at the site offering free email accounts. Now, any junk mail list that they may add your email address to (or sell your email address to) will go to this new free account and if that becomes bogged down after a few months or years, it’s no big deal to just create a new one. You can repeat this process endlessly, avoiding massive amounts of spam that would normally head straight to your real email account.
Below is a partial list of sites currently offering free email accounts, if you’d like to find more options just type “free email account” into the search bar of your choice.
• Microsoft’s Hotmail.com
• Yahoo.com
• Google’s Gmail.com
• Mail.com
• Inbox.com
• FastMail.com
• Hushmail.com
Remember, sometimes the only way to not get buried beneath an avalanche of spam is to not give out your true email address to just anyone. Free email accounts are there for you to take advantage of. Think of using one as your way of preserving that perfect email address you already have and don’t wish to change because it’s no longer functional due to an over abundance of spam..
Mark Allen provides the knowledge you need to protect yourself from a computer virus, spyware, and Internet scams at: http://SaferEmails.com
