Too Much Spam, Solution Needed

My old address gets too much spam, what do I do?

[freshfish]

Hey there,
I have managed to live without any spam filters. For a while, I was very good about not using my email address for site logins that i was unsure of. So I never really had a Spam issue...it seems I slipped along the way and now if I dont check my email on the weekend, I have 50-100 spam messages or more.

Since this is my own domain, and all my friends and fam and contacts have this address, I would like to keep it.

If the address is [e-mail] and I use Outlook
...what would you suggest?

- Spam filter of some sort? If so, what do you suggest?
- Is there an easy way to change the alias without having to inform all contacts?

Thanks!

[Lexur]

1st.- Change your address, you are not only webmaster but postmaster too

2nd.- If you don't want to change your address, just do a redirection to a gmail account, and then download the gmail account with your email client

Don't care too much for your privacy/email accounts: any account called webmaster@yourdomain, info@ contact@, admin@, sales, and so on, will be automatically tested and (depending of the email server response -delivered, unknown, full mailbox...-) will be loaded with tons of spam.

[atpalmer23]

You are hosed.. I had this happen with [e-mail]. Just make a new one [e-mail].

Avoid the webmaster, info, sales.. one mentioned above.

Also you can create a junk email account like [e-mail]. Use that for the random signup stuff.

[jezra]

Hello Freshfish,
If you are using Outlook, I would suggest using spambayes to filter your mail. If you decide to use spambayes, set the threshhold for spam and possible spam to large percentages. For example, in my set up, if spambayes is 99% sure that an email is spam, then the email is moved into the spam folder. If spambayes is 80% sure that an email is spam, then the email gets moved into the "possible spam" folder. Everytime you mark an email as spam, spambayes will "learn" and adapt. it is a seriously phenomenal piece of software.

[freshfish]

Thanks for the advice...

Is Spambayes still experimental? Is it buggy?

[bedlam]

The chief developer of a popular open source project came up with a clever solution. Figuring that a widely known email address lasts about a year, he now publishes it as

[e-mail]

So, your email address for this year could be something like

[e-mail]

and change each year. It's not much more difficult for your contacts to remember than your original address--provided your contacts can be trusted to know what year it is...

-b

[jezra]

I've been using spambayes for a few years and I've have zero problems. I currently have it filtering both [e-mail] and [e-mail].

[futuresky]

Using email aliases I give (nearly) every different person and organisation a unique email address to use to contact me. That way I can close one down or change any one address if I start getting spam on it, without having to contact everyone else. It took a good 6 to 9 months I guess to gradually migrate (and inform all parties concerned of the new address they should use for contact) from having just one or two email addresses to the multitude that I now use but I'm happy to have done it. Currently getting some spam on one or two addresses (particularly from whois lookups) but 20 minutes of adjustments can stop that.

The other bonus is that by having a different emal address for each organisation etc you can tell exactly where someone obtained the email address they're using to spam you.