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Post your comments for Why do I get so much spam? here

[MKZ1945]

Good article Lincoln. Most of this should be common sense to computer users, but for some reason some very intelligent people I know seem to throw common sense out the window when they are around computers. The best advice I’ve found is to create one or two email accounts and use them as addresses for anything that you have to sign up for online. The amount of garbage you are going to get from places that are just barely related to some site you order things from, or whatever else you need to sign into, is crazy. I have mine tied into Thunderbird, and just delete them once or twice a week. Don’t even look at them.

[HvonT]

I find that if I use a .edu email address, which are available to most college alums from their college, I get much less spam than when using a .com or .net address. So I have several of these for use with online transactions, as MKZ1945 suggests.

[Spunkmeyer]

I'm not as big of a fan of spam filters. The problem is that spam filters are so simplified that legitimate emails also get sent to the spam filter. Even stuff like federal responses. So even though 99% of the time the junk folder is full of spam, I have to individually checkmark each one as I look down the list for that 1% I can't afford to miss.

[ReadandShare]

Spam filters are much better than they used to be. When I signed up for my Gmail account (back when Google first opened it up) -- I was getting dozens of spams every day -- even though I didn't actually use that account and didn't share the account name with anyone. The spams continued relentlessly -- until a sudden, big drop off about 3 or so years ago.

I now use the above account regularly -- and I get maybe one spam every couple of days. I understand that Google automatically filters out 99% of spam -- and my own Gmail filters clean out the rest -- except for the occasional onesie and twosies that make it into my spam folder or inbox.

[ronin7752]

Also, find out how to report spam to your email host and *always* forward it to them. Doesn't always help -- but it has worked for me....

[marty32]

I don't understand spam filters, which is why I don't trust them. I actually see a few dozen spam messages a day. I would rather delete them myself than try to remember to check for false positives regularly, because the spam messages themselves remind me to delete them.

However, even though I think I disabled spam filtering everywhere, I recently happened to look in my spam folder and I saw messages I never put there and that my local spam rules don't cover. I didn't see any useful messages there but I might have missed some. I will just have to hope I don't miss any important email.

[jmjohnson]

I get spam because my FRIENDS' web-based email accounts are hijacked along with their online contact list.

I almost never get spam as a result of providing alternate email addresses to commercial web sites. Most legit business minded site operators have figured out they can take long term loses for the short term gain of selling or even not protecting, their clients' email addresses.

[pcdoctorny]

Spam filters do not always work. It will be enough to have the entire email address frozen into a jpeg or png. That always worked out for me and my sites.