4 Ways to Protect Your Email Inbox
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Everybody knows how annoying, offensive, and downright vulgar spam can be. Here are a few tricks to help you keep these messages from making it to your inbox.
Step 1 - Read a site’s privacy policy
Just because it says “privacy” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about protecting yours. Specifically, it’s supposed to tell you how the site’s owner is going to use your information and how it won’t use it. So it’s conceivable that your email could be up for sale. If they don’t have a policy, be leery. But if they do and you don’t feel comfortable with it, you may wish to reconsider entering things like your email.
Step 2 - Don’t hand out your email to just anyone
Just because a site asks for all that information, doesn’t mean you need to give it to them. Let’s say you’re signing up for a newsletter to be emailed to you. The form asks for your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, etc. Are these pieces of information required? In some cases it may be perfectly understandable and therefore all right to give them what they ask for. Just be aware that you’re not obligated to give them what they want unless you choose to obligate yourself.
Step 3 - Setup a free email account
If you don’t already have one, get one. You have so many to choose from: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN, etc. Most of the offerings you’ll find should have the ability to forward email to another account. (Places like Gmail have it for free, but others may consider it a premium offering.) Using another email account to act as a proxy is a great way to keep something between you and the sender. Just pay attention to which address you should be replying from.
Step 4 - Using a proxy email service
This is your best defense. Services like Sneakemail, GishPuppy, and spambox! allow you to create an email address on-the-fly and forwards emails to a specified account — the account, in this case, is the one you want to protect. Two things to remember here:
- For best results, create a new “temporary” address for each site you submit it to (more on this below).
- These services don’t store your emails, they just forward them on to a destination.
The neat thing about these services is that they allow you to control the expiration of the address it creates for you, anywhere from an hour to indefinitely, depending on which service you use. This is another reason why you should create one for each site you submit to because if you start receiving spam from a site you submitted your “temporary” address, you’ll know which one to expire on demand.
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Comments
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And less than 25 percent of users avoid the temptation of clicking on links in spam messages. If you’d like to know more about how to see less spam in your inbox, I wrote an article that you’ll find beneficial: 4 Ways to Protect Your Email Inbox Brought to you by Family WebWatch Blog | Fave FWW | Subscribe to FWW
Regarding Step 3 - those using Thunderbird email program should consider the Identity Reminder extension https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2121/ - when you create a new email, a box pops up allowing you to choose which email address you want to send from. I’ve found it very useful, as I use several email addresses (including some throw-away ones to cut down on spam) and it’s all to easy to hit “send” and then realise I’ve used my personal email address.