Digging Out Of A SPAM Pit

Spam Assassin is my friend!It's one thing to start using a SPAM-blocking system like what we have designed from the beginning, and another to starting using it when you have been using the same email address for many years (Since late 1999) and have many other email addresses and forwards that you have been using for different sites and purposes.

Perhaps I will be my own best test case to see how practical this really is. But it's going to take some time to start changing subscriptions and sending people new email addresses. I really HATE the idea of dumping my main email address. I have fought long and hard reporting spammers to keep it usable. I still get a lot of spam, but my spam reports have resulted in many spammer accounts being closed and SPAM Assassin filters out most of the garden variety spam, so even though I have been using the same email address for about 9 years the spam has not gotten too bad.

So maybe I will just keep the main email address that I use for now, and change over what I can moving forward. When I wrote the title for this post I was thinking about the spam being a huge problem, but really it's the fact that I have used one email address for many years, and there are so many people and accounts that have it listed that to notify and change them all seems like a job that could take a long, long time to complete.

For now I just have to remember to create new email forwards when I need to provide an email address. Also, I have two "hidden" POP3 email accounts at the moment. These are un-guessable accounts that I use to collect mail from all the forwards. The idea is that I can create and delete forwards easily, but if I have to delete a POP3 account it's going to be a lot of work. I would have to change all the forwards to go to a new POP3 in order to keep the SPAM out.

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