Time to change my email?…

[Mike Cohen]

We went through this a few years ago. We all started off with firstname@domain.com back in the mid-90’s. In the early 00’s we adopted the first_initial_lastname@domain.net. I was the last person to kill the old email address because of the perception of legacy contacts. However after a year of having all old email forward to the new email, it was clear that most of the forwards were spam. Once we shut down the old email permanently, our inboxes became much more manageable.

Today, the majority of SPAM we get are those phishing emails telling you to update your facebook or bank account information. The telltale sign of a fake email is one that is signed, “The Facebook Team” or “The Bank of America Team.”

Our email server flags suspected email to be deleted upon download into our local email software. Plus you can setup filters locally.

As for “change of address” messages. Best thing to do is send a change of address message to people you know, then just start emailing people you know with your new email address. Once someone replies to your new address, their own address books will be updated (but they will need to manually delete your old address).

Mike Cohen

[Mark Suszko]

Sucjk it up but add “capcha” to your setup, you know, where you have to ercognize a random set of hard to read numbers and letters in an image and type them ina nox, to prove you’re not a’bot.

Though now there are places in very poor nations where people sit in a one-bulb mud hut with a wifi link and a laptop, doing nothing all day but manually by-passing captcha to allow a bot to get past it. Ah, the wonders of the internet economy… such a sceanrio just a decade ago would have been the premise of a science fiction short story.

[Ryan Mast]

I’d recommend just getting a good spam filter. My various email addresses have been on the web for years, and I funnel them all into a single Gmail account. Out of the ~8,500 spam messages I get a week, occasionally one or two will get through.

[Ron Lindeboom]

Another point I would add to Mike Cohen’s advice, is that keep the old address coming but send it all to a folder that you rarely check. Every once in a while, go through the folder and eyeball it to see if anyone is writing you that you may have missed informing of the change of address. Empty and season to taste.

The sad tale is that some of us are not in a situation where we can change our email addresses. I tried but I gave up as far too many of our customers just did not want to update and kept writing me at my old address. So here I am, all these years later hiding behind a wall of rules, filters and exceptions that allows me to function — just enough to be practical.

😉

Ron Lindeboom

[Arnie Schlissel]

You might want to try adding Spam Assassin to your email server. You might already have it, and just need to turn it on & configure it.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Joel Servetz]

I’ll tell all of you something that most of you will probably laugh at. I’m still using AOL. Why? Aside from the obvious reason that it’s too much trouble to change after all these years, I find that it simply (emphasis on simply) works. Until a couple of years ago I had a “real job” in addition to my independent video/photography work and there we had a so-called “professional” e-mail system. Even after the complex and time-consuming setup to try to train it to weed out spam, I always had to wade through tons of it. To make matters worse, the junk mail filter made it difficult for unknown but legitimate folks to get their e-mails through, so that too often I would get a call from someone wondering why I hadn’t responded, so that I then had to wade through my junk mail file to find their e-mail. Between AOL and the very excellent tools by Norton, phishing and other malware e-mails are either caught by Norton or easily eliminated forever by AOL by me simply checking a box next to the obvious spam and clicking the SPAM button and voila, it’s gone forever. A guy I was working a job with recently was aghast when he saw I was still on AOL, commenting that “it’s so ’80’s.” Yeah well, it’s simple and it works.

Joel Servetz
RGB Media Services, LLC
Sarasota, Fl
videobyjoel@aol.com

[Ed Cilley]

Frank,
We run ours through SpamArrest.com It sends a challenge email to unknown addressees and allows them to authorize their email. I can also view unverified and authorize. Spam can’t get around this because they use other people’s email addresses and therefore never see the challenge response. I can also add an entire domain. So when I am doing business with a company and expect mail from various people they won’t get the challenge email. I can still look through my unverified mail and pull any real messages out.

They have webmail access or you can use your email program of choice.

To see my challenge – ed at jumpcutpictures.com

I’m sure this is just one of many options.

Ed

Avid and FCP Preditor
_________________________________________________
Anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield

[Aaron Neitz]

[Ryan Mast] “I’d recommend just getting a good spam filter. My various email addresses have been on the web for years, and I funnel them all into a single Gmail account. Out of the ~8,500 spam messages I get a week, occasionally one or two will get through.”

This is what I’ve done: forward everything through Gmail. It’s Spam filters are really quite good. It’s probably not the most elegant solution but it gets the job done.

[Walter Soyka]

I’ll add my voice to those suggesting a spam filter. I use MX Logic (through my mail provider), and it’s quite nice. I get a daily email with a list of messages blocked, so I can verify at a glance that there were no false positives.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking

[Franklin Mcmahon]

All great advice.

I am VERY curious about spam arrest though. I looked into it years ago and research showed that it was not the best (like the company was actually doing spamming itself, there were better business bureau reports, etc.)

It was unfortunate because it sounded like exactly what I wanted, and fairly foolproof. Is the company better now? Anyone using it?

Like Ron said…it may be a lost cause to change my email…its been around so long people will still keep using the old one I am sure 🙁

Frank

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