My Merchant Account Blog

Ways to Prevent Spam

Friday, April 07, 2006

When you go to a website, they almost always want your email address.  Most people have a at least two email addresses: one for family and friends and one for business.  Most of the email addresses people get are free, e.g. from live.com, GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.  There are pros and cons associated with these email addresses of course.  For example, if your personal "GMail" account is a bit too "personal", you don't want to give that out to a human resource department. 

So what's the best way to control spam, be professional, and friendly?  Get your own domain name.  Yes, that's right.  Go to a registrar, for example:

• www.GoDaddy.com
• www.Dotster.com
• www.Omnis.com

You do not need to know how to build a website.  You only need a hosting company, like TechEvolution, to host your email.  Let's say you and your significant other names' are Brad and Jennifer.  You can see if the domain name bradandjennifer.com is available.  If it is, this will cost you about $10.00 a year for registration.  Then you can use a company, TechEvolution or even go back to GoDaddy.

Once you set up your domain, you will set up a POP3 account.  What I have done is set up a personal email address that I give out to people I trust.  I then have what is called a "catch-all" - let's call it catchall@bradandjennifer.com.  So, when I go to Facebook, I set up facebook@bradandjennifer.com.  When Facebook sends out a confirmation email, it will be diverted over to this catch-all account.  I can confirm the email address. 

Let's say about a week down the road, you notice you are receiving a lot of email addressed to this email address.  TechEvolution offers SmarterMail as one mail server (another is Microsoft Exchange).

In the SmarterMail Web Control Panel, you can set up a filter to automatically delete any e-mail that is now sent to this e-mail address.  Of course, you will want to first change your e-mail address on Facebook first.

We don't mean to pick on Facebook, but we recommend that you do this for every company - Amazon, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PayPal etc.  This also helps you immediately if you receive an e-mail from your bank telling you their has been a problem and you need to sign into their website by using a link in the e-mail.  If the e-mail is not addressed to, say hsbc@bradandjennifer.com, then you know it is a "phishing" e-mail.  Of course, you should always go to the financial institution's website.

You hear a lot about "breaches", but only the person's name and e-mail address was compromised, no 'vital' information to your account.  However, your e-mail address is important to you of course and not as trivial as they might want you to think.

Another option is to just open a free email account used for the message boards / forums / social media websites as well, but that could be another thing to do.  If you get your own domain name, you can easily save any / all e-mails on your local computer with an e-mail client, like Microsoft Outlook.

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