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By
HANS NYBERG
Spam.
I'm not talking about that food, rather, that "unsolicited
commercial e-mail." Digitalized junk mail. The stuff you
get bombarded with after signing up for something on the
Internet that requires your e-mail address. I hate spam.
This is where some tricks come into play. First, only give
away your address to people you know and trust. Don't use
it when signing up for accounts online. But when an address
is required, what do you do besides making up one? The problem
with making up one is that some sites send your password
to that address, making sure it is correct. And when you
forget your password, they can't send it to your e-mail
address, because it's not a real one (or yours).
How do you avoid these problems, but still keep the integrity
of your real address? It's as simple as going to Yahoo or
Lycos, or one of the thousands of other sites that offers
free e-mail, and signing up for an account. Make it something
easy to remember, and go ahead and use a simple password.
Forget all those warnings about having a password with numbers
and letters mixed up. Is it really going to be a big deal
if someone breaks into your e-mail, just to find junk?
Use this address for everything you sign up for. Keep your
original address for personal correspondence. But remember
to periodically check your spam address to make sure something
(somewhat) important wasn't sent there. It's also fun to
see how many slices of spam were sent to you since you last
checked.
However, for many people they are already getting dump trucks
full of stuff that should have been sent to the landfill.
What do you do? Well, there's always the drastic step of
changing your address. But then you have to worry about
people that don't know that your address is changed. For
anybody, though, there are a few steps to take to eliminate
spam. First, don't unsubscribe. At least for some spammers,
this just lets them know that your address is active.
For others, the "kind" spammers, they will actually remove
you from their lists. Next, sign up for a spam address and
start sending the junk there. Finally, get MailWasher.
MailWasher is a free program made specifically to eliminate
spam. It pulls up your e-mail without downloading it, and
lets you decide what to do with it. You can almost always
tell from just the subject and who it was from whether it
is spam or not. If not, you can open the message and find
out from there.
There are a few things you can do to the message once you
know that it is spam. You can delete it, bounce it, and
blacklist it. Deleting it is pretty simple: it will delete
the message from the server, so that you do not have to
download it in your mail program. It can also bounce the
message back to the sender, acting like the address is not
valid. You can also put it on the blacklist. By doing this,
all future messages from this address will automatically
be set to be deleted and bounced.
When MailWasher is done processing the mail, it will open
your default e-mail program and receive your good mail.
This eliminates all the junk in your actual e-mail program.
There are a few problems with MailWasher, though. First,
it doesn't work with web-based e-mail like AOL, Yahoo or
Hotmail. It needs a POP server. POP servers are the things
that get your mail when you download it to your computer.
Yahoo does, however, offer a way to get a POP server, which
then allows you to use MailWasher.
There are also some bugs in it. One of the older versions
I ran crashed several times, although it was nothing major.
(But then, the multi-billion dollar Microsoft can't debug
their software ... and they charge a lot for it.) MailWasher
is free, but does ask for a possible donation. "As low as
$3 or as high as you wish. Think of it as a tip."
Overall, I definitely think MailWasher is worth the 1.5
Mb download. It's available at www.mailwasher.net.
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