Time Saving Email Tip
April 3, 2008 by Karen Weideman
Filed under time saving
I don’t know about you, but I get more than a thousand junk emails each week! To help cut down on the number of spam emails that I receive in my inbox, I created another email account at yahoo. This is the email address that I always give away to businesses, Cash Crate (lol), websites that are giving away freebies, etc. I still receive way too many spam emails at my regular address, but this system has helped out a lot. It has saved me so much time when sorting through emails each day.
Do you have more than one email address?
I actually use a website called mailinator.com when I sign up for things I am positive are going to spam me. It is a huge timesaver, because you don’t even have to register. Just use any word you feel like, and then add @mailinator.com to the end. If you really REALLY need to check it, you can, but it doesn’t save the spam for long. I pair this up with gmail, which has an amazing spam filter. I get maybe one junk email a week.
I have a personal web domain for our family. I have simply create new email addresses for each new item I need. They all come to the same place, but it is a filter so that I know exactly whom is sending us email and if a certain place, etc starts sending spam – I simply filter it out to the trash bin.
I have 3 email addresses. One is the family email address, then I have 2 others. One I get more spam in than anything else, than the other, but I still use them both.
I use a hotmail account for contests, etc., a gmail account for me and family account for other stuff. The third is through Rogers (our Internet supplier) and it gets the most spam, hotmail lets in the next largest amount but gmail filters almost all spam.
I have several but my email filter is fantastic. I use microsoft office and just keep working on keeping my junk email folder current.
Wow! You’ve got some great tips for handling spam (which is a major problem of mine).
I actually have 4 addresses. One is the home one…only for friends and family. Not for the “outside” world. One is a hotmail account that I use to sign up for contests, accounts that I don’t want spam from, mypoints, and overall offers/registrations. One is my gmail account that I set up only for using google tools. There is actually nothing in that one. And one is an email from my alumni association. I use it for job searches/resumes because it is really just a redirector. I can go to my alumni association site and direct it to any actual email address I want. When I was job hunting, it went into my “real” inbox. Now it is directed at my “junk” box in hotmail. I still get email from headhunters if I care to look at them, but since I’m not job-hunting anymore, I can ignore it too.
I have one for generic/junk – my yahoo. It’s the public one. Then I have a hotmail one for work-related things (resumes, etc). I have a gmail one for friends and family, and then my school-specific emails.
Actually, the best way to handle spam is like this:
If I’m not interested in anything they have to say I will sign up with an account from http://www.guerrillamail.com/ . That’s a free, temporary email service. After 15 minutes the email address disappears.
If I want to get notifications from them I send them to my gmail account but I add a plus sign and an identifier. So if your gmail address was heather@gmail.com and you wanted to get notifications from my mailing list you would give me the email address heather+fatb@gmail.com
You’ll still get all the emails but now you can set up a filter on that address and automatically put all those emails in one folder. That makes it really easy to figure out who has been selling your email address to spammers.
Beside my hosted accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN) Since I have my own domain, I break everything out in assorted addresses, but they all get fed into a “catchall account” I create accounts uniquely like myWAMUAccount@mydomain.com. This way, I can filter it out if it becomes to “spammy,” but also the big benefit is I also find out who is “leaking” my name to mailing lists, etc. and I either stop doing business with them or read them the riot act for selling my information. (I have in several cases even threatened lawsuits since their Terms of Service state they will not do that.)
Wow, Jay! That sounds like a good system. I think I might need a big tutorial for it though. lol That’s pretty cool that you’re figuring out who’s selling your info. The number of spam emails that I receive has really increased since I posted my email address here at TM. Oh well. My spam filter catches them, but then I still have to fish through the spam for the legitimate emails.