Unsolicited E-mail

Paranoid2000,
Isn't there a more simple (and lazy) way to protect my email-address from being stolen from my computer.
Encrypting my harddisk for instance, would that help ?

 

The problem isn't having your address stolen from your PC (though there are email harvesting worms, any half-decent AV scanner should stop these on your system), the problem is that when you send someone an email, you have no control over what they do with that address. They could pass it on to others, put it on a webpage, sell it or even get hijacked by an address-stealing worm themsevles.

In addition, spammers can use "dictionary" or "brute force" attacks on ISP mailservers to get a list of all users or just send email to a random prefix, e.g. sfafearhf@yourname.yourisp.com in the hope that it reaches someone (since many address harvesters just aim to put together a list of x million email addresses to sell to other guillible would-be spammers, this desperate technique does get used surprisingly often).

The only option to stop this is an email alias service where you give each person a unique address to contact you with. The easiest and most powerful I have found is SpamGourmet - once you have created an account, you'll only need to visit it if:

• you wish to send email from a new alias (as opposed to an existing one where you can just Reply to the last mesage using it);
• to make an alias permanent or refresh its count (they will only forward a set number of messages by default, though you can then specify certain domains/users as trusted who then have no such restriction applied) or
• to shut down an alias that starts to receive spam.

It may take some time to appreciate all the features that SpamGourmet offers (e.g. prefixes and watch-words to stop spammers from creating random aliases) but it will be time well-spent. The only downside is that SpamGourmet is an extra step for your email that can go wrong - and if SpamGourmet has any outages, it will affect all messages routed through it. Having said that, there has only been one major outage in the last few years which compares well to most ISPs.

One extra benefit of SpamGourmet, if you change ISP (and email address), you only need to update SpamGourmet's settings to tell it to send email to your new address. That saves you having to inform everyone you deal with of your address change.

 

Paranoid2000,
Thanks for telling me the other ways of stealing email-addresses.
I stored the SpamGourmet-link on my computer and will study it.
Another advantage of SpamGourmet is that everything is explained in Dutch, my language.