The Bane of My Inbox, Spam!

I absolutely despise spam. I think I hate it more than most and I spend a lot of time trying to defeat the nasty email. Sometimes I think I'm winning, but the victory soon turns to the agony of defeat. I have created, abandoned and deleted so many email accounts I have lost track of the number.

I have used countless spam filters that only half did the job. The filters either were too aggressive or let too much through and they all slowed the flow of email due to the filtering. My ISP has spam filtering, but I don't use it. I would rather read email that has been downloaded to my computer and the spam filters put too many legitimate emails in the Bulk folder. I have to log onto the account on the web and sort through the Bulk mail, find the legitimate mail and move it to the Inbox. The filters are supposed to 'learn', but they don't 'learn' fast enough for me. Once the spam that gets by the filters have downloaded to my computer it is too late to 'teach' the spam filter.

I think I may have found a solution for keeping spam away from my Inbox. My ISP offers something called AddressGuard™. It's really simple to use; I just create some 'throw-a-way email addresses. I use these addresses for different things. One is just for registering to view content on websites. Once the spam shows up, (and it will, some of those sites lie like crazy when they say they will not share your email address) I just delete the account. I have another just for Yahoo Groups. Once an infected computer owned by a Yahoo Groups member starts sending me spam, I just will delete that account and create another.

If your ISP doesn't offer this service and you would like to have it; there are a number of services that will provide it for a fee. Yahoo Mail Plus provides the same service for $19.99 a year. With Yahoo Mail Plus you can also download your mail to an email client on your computer.

Here's hoping I have found the solution to no more spam for my Inbox! (At least for a while.)

However, if you want to try to prevent spam by using some other methods, you can look at Spam in Your Inbox and use these tips to avoid spam.

Martha