inbox management
I use the mail-forwarding service at sneakemail.com as one of the layers in my spam management strategy.
If you have used email for longer than 10 days or so, you are famililar with the category of email known as spam. The most permissive definition of spam includes any unwanted email, regardless of the source. Some spam is unavoidable, like the weekly email from HR that tells you who has a birthday this week and how long they've been with the company. Other spam comes unexpectedly: you buy something from Amazon.com and suddenly you're getting emails daily from TigerDirect. Still other spam is obviously the result of some kind of criminal enterprise, promoting a stock or purporting to sell pharmaceuticals or imitation Rolex watches.
My favorite kind of spam is certainly the Nigerian Prince emails- I have a collection of ten or twelve of the best ones I've received that I read sometimes when I'm feeling down because they never fail to cheer me up. Here's a very long list of them for your enjoyment if you've been so unfortunate to go through this much of your life without receiving one yourself. NOTE: DO NOT send any of these people ANY money whatsoever. Just read it and laugh. When I read "DEAR FRIEND, THROUGH THE COURTESY OF BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, I TAKE LIBERTY ANCHORED ON A STRONG DESIRE TO SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE ON THIS MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL AND RISKFREE TRANSACTION WHICH I HOPE YOU WILL GIVE YOUR URGENT ATTENTION." from DR. EMMANUEL CHINEWESI it's really all I can do to keep myself from laughing out loud.
Sometimes it's obvious how your email fell into a spammer's hands. Revisiting the examples above, if it's your company email, you can't help but get those "Where I spent $400 on golf this weekend" emails from the CEO. If you buy something from Buy.com, and then you suddenly start getting 3 or 4 mails from Buy.com every day, the connection is clear. If your Mom calls because she has a computer virus and wants to know how to fix it, and you suddenly start getting spam that looks like it's coming from your Mom's email address, or your Mom's friends and coworkers, it's easy to make the connection.
But many times, it's not immediately clear how your address fell into the hands of a spammer. Let's say you use your email address to sign up at CNN for news and updates about the Summer Olympics. And then let's say that CNN sells your address to a marketing company, or to its corporate sponsors. The marketing company can sell your email address to hundreds of buyers in just a few weeks- and then you're doomed, because each of THOSE buyers can keep selling your address right down the line. The trickle of spam that begins will turn into a river and then a flood, and every second or third email you get at that address will be spam. Unless you have an overwhelming need to obtain a mortgage or enlarge a certain part of your anatomy, sometimes the only remedy is to abandon the address.
So, spam is a problem. It consumes expensive bandwith and leads vituous Americans down the road to perdition and disgrace. And just deleting it all can be pretty annoying if perdition and disgrace aren't your thing. People have invented methods to keep spam out of your inbox, and the spammers have responded by inventing their own countermeasures. Word Salad emails were a particularly interesting development, as are the wacky names that get stuck on the "From:" fields of some of these mails. The latest spam innovation I've noticed is that spammers are concealing their payload in an image attached to the email, and beating the bayesian filter methods by capturing text from sites like Yahoo! News or ESPN and pasting it into the body of the email. The blacklist sites and the filters can't possibly keep up. So, what's a reasonable person to do?
I now maintain three separate accounts- one at gmail, one at law school, and one at malachiarts. The spam filter at gmail tends to work pretty well- I can say with 90% confidence that I've received less than 10 spam messages in my inbox at that account since I started using it in 2004. The uoregon email address is new enough that I don't have many spam problems there -and I haven't used it to sign up for anything, or published it anywhere online- so the spam I get at my school account is strictly of the "I have textbooks to sell / please sublet my apartment for the summer / License Plate 606 BOB left your lights on" variety. The malachiarts account is a different story, for a variety of reasons.
First, malachiarts recieves forwarded mail from my CalTech account, which has been active since 1996- that's ten years' worth of received mail, sitting out there on other people's computers, just waiting for a virus to harvest my address. Second, this is the one account that has remained constant through the last three companies that I've worked for, which means I've sent a lot of mail to and from that address. Third, malachiarts.com is a legitimate corporate entity, and as such, is a target for random crackers to attack: and the username "smiley" is definitely inside the sample space of dictionary words that spammers use when attacking a domain.
I have a multi-pronged approach to keeping spam out of my malachiarts inbox. One prong is SpamAssassin, a spam filter program that scans all of my incoming mail and attempts to separate the good from the bad. SA looks at every feature of an incoming mail, and if too many of them seem spam-like, it discards the mail before I see it. Probably the neatest feature about SA is that you can train it to recognize spam that it's missing. If you're running SA, and you suddenly start getting lots of spam about fake rolex watches, you can teach SA to recognize those mails and discard them. However, the "word salad" style spams were very effective at fooling SA, and the "copy paste" spams seem to work even better.
The second, and possibly more effective prong, is Sneakemail. SpamAssassin deals with spam at its destination; Sneakemail allows you to cut spam off at its source. I've been using the email forwarding service at sneakemail.com since 2002. To use the service, you create a user account, give them a "real" email address, and away you go. Sneakemail allows you to create a new email address, on-the-fly, for each form you fill out on the web. Every e-commerce site, every auto repair blog, every free prize drawing... you just create a new sneakemail address. Sure, the address looks odd becuase it's computer generated, but what do you care? It's not as though a real person needs to remember it- you're feeding an address to a machine so that it can confirm that your order shipped on time.
For each address you create, Sneakemail allows you to give it a name and record notes about where you used it and details such as when the address was created. Then, when anyone sends mail to that address, Sneakemail forwards it to your REAL address, flagged with the name you gave it. This is useful for spam management, becuase you can keep track of which address is getting the spam, and if it gets too bad you can simply delete the offending sneakemail address without impacting the rest of your email communications.
Imagine you have a brand new email address (brandnew@email.com) that has never been used before and you are shopping online today. You make a purchase from each of three different websites: Amazon, Ebay, and CafePress. You give your brandnew address to each site to create an account, and each one sends you mail to confirm your order. All is right with the world, until next week when you start getting spam at your new address! Becuase you've only used your brandnew email at three websites, you know that one of them must have sold you out- but which one? Naturally you want to avoid doing business in the future with an unscrupulous company who sells your contact information without your permission- but in this scenario, you don't know who to punish.
Enter Sneakemail. Before you buy anything, go to sneakemail.com and enter your brandnew email address there. Use Sneakemail to generate new addresses, one for Amazon, one for Ebay, and one for Cafepress (I find that it's easiest to keep things organized if you label the addresses with the name of the sites where they were used). Now, when spam begins arriving, the "From:" line is clearly labeled by its source. This is how it looks in my inbox, with the source (eBay) in bold:
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:29:36
From: Constable P. Fishsticks xxx@xxxxxx.com |eBay.com|
To: brandnew
Subject: pickpocket crooning
Dear friend,
My proposal to you will be very surprising as we have not had any personal contact. However I sincerely seek your confidence in this transaction which I propose to you as a person of transparency and caliber. [...]
sneakemail tells you who the guilty sender is, so you can punish them appropriately. You can write them a nasty letter, or send them a bill, or a lawsuit. Or you can just make a mental note not to buy from that vendor in the future, cut off the address and go on with your life, which is what I tend to do.
Once you know the source, you can go back to sneakemail.com and simply delete the source address. None of your other senders are affected, your mom doesn't need to update her address book, and the guilty party can't send you mail any more, becuase the address you gave them is dead now. And you get to continue leading a healthy spam-free life.