How to avoid it and take a little revenge

Spam emails pour into our accounts every day. There are many ways to limit this influx including separate ‘public’ and ‘private’ email addresses, filtering on your computer, and filtering even before it gets to your account.

If, like me, you are a little unwilling to give your personal email address to a random website then how about having a disposable email account that feeds into your account. Tired of that spam? Delete the disposable and replace it with another, spam-free. If your email provider does not give you this facility then take a look at services such as Blur or Burner Emails.

These email wrappers give you the opportunity to have a different address for each website. This means if a site is hacked and your address is strewn over the internet, you can resolve the situation by simply change your disposable address with the site. Quick, simple and permanent.

Filtering is an on-going battle of updating filters to block the latest wave of spam. You can make this easier with some software such as Mailwasher Pro and SpamFighter which run on desktop / laptops. If you have a Chromebook or mobile device then the Mailwasher app may be a good bet to give you a range of effective filtering options.

Running a mac? Take a look at Spamsieve ($30) to resolve your spam issues.

Filtering on your device will reduce your spam count but maintaining filters on several devices can be annoying. If you have your own domain email address (e.g. yourname@yourdomain.co.uk) then you can replace the separate filtering programs with a filter system that protects not just your own email address but all addresses associated with your domain. It does this in one place and before the adverts even get to your account. For this you need a service such as SpamHero to remove the unwanted emails. This runs in the cloud so that any device you use will have its email filtered with no extra setup required.

Then we come to revenge which, it is said, is a dish best eaten cold. You can take a little revenge on the spammers in a couple of ways to suit your fancy.

Spamnesty and re:Scam are examples of spam-baiting tools which aim to waste spammers’ time by beginning automated correspondence with their ‘service’. Re:Scam is simple to use: simply forward spam email to me@rescam.org and they will proceed with the email conversation on your behalf. You can watch from the sidelines if you wish to observe how peculiar and off-beam the protracted conversation may become.

A different approach is to report the spam. SpamCop is a reporting service that aims to find the origin of the spam and blacklist it which makes messages sent from that server more likely to be automatically blocked. This can be effective. However, it can also catch the innocent in its net by blacklisting servers that might also be used for perfectly legitimate email.