[Techtalk] Dealing with allegedly respectable company who send spam

[Akkana Peck]

TraceyC writes:
> To avoid this in the future, I second the suggestion to use throwaway
> e-mail addresses for businesses you aren't sure will spam you. You can
> search the web, there are a few services which provide one time e-mail
> addresses that will forward to your real e-mail account. Good luck :)

I'm not really disagreeing, but there is one downside to using a
lot of email addresses like this if you don't manage it carefully.

I find I've ended up with a slew of email addresses (maybe 20)
and I'm not sure which ones I've given to which companies, so
I'm nervous about turning any of them off because some of them might
sometimes get useful mail.

However, some (many) of them did get leaked to spammers -- *in
addition to* maybe being used for useful purposes. What that
means is that I have spam coming in on 20 addresses instead
of just one, so my spam volume is way higher with lots of duplicates.

If I had managed this properly from the beginning, taking careful
note of when and to whom I gave each address out, this might not
be a problem since I could move the useful stuff and then close
out the bad addresses. As it is, though, it's too big a project
to monitor which addresses are attracting the most spam, and also
watch them for several months to see if any get non-spam, to figure
out which ones I can close out.

I'm not saying don't do it. Just don't do it haphazardly like I did,
because you may end up with much more spam in the long run.

	...Akkana