Part 1

On average I receive about one spam email a week. This is how I combat spam:

For the last couple years I have successfully kept spam out of my inbox. I purchased a domain name for about $10/year. I then signed up for Google Apps. Free email account. http://www.google.com/a/ Doing this allows me to use Google’s Gmail service for my domain. Also included with this is their state-of-the-art spam filter. I setup an email address called a “Catchall” account. This account will accept all emails from my domain. Ex: If my domain was example.com and you sent and email to james@example.com or abc343@example.com then I would receive both emails.

Anytime I am required to enter my email address I use a false (but true) email address. For instance this weekend I purchased 3 sets of cotter pins from Sears online. Sears required me to enter an email address to complete my purchase. I gave them sears@example.com as my email address. I now know that any email sent to sears@example.com is an email from Sears. If I start receiving other email to that email address then I know that Sears either sold my email address or someone got lucky spamming me. (To date Sears has not sold my email address; this is only an example)

Later on if I decide that I want to receive emails from Sears, I will login to my Google account and create a filter to forward emails sent to sears@example.com to my email address.

I tend to check my Catchall email account weekly. Anytime I receive an email that is spam the first thing I do is flag the email as spam. This is why Google’s spam service is so effective. Google knows that if 1,000 people all marked a similar email as spam chances are it is spam; evolving daily into a very powerful spam filter.