Why you need 3 email accounts
For many of us, email has become part of our daily lives.
No matter what tools we use, though, much of the mail we receive is univited, time-wasting or spam.
With this article, I shall try to explain how to receive trusted email and divert spam to a sacrificial email account.
What, I believe, we need is some way of receiving email so that we know it is relevant, trustworthy (where appropriate), and discardable, where not.
There are many free email providers and we should feel free to take advantage of their services.
Also, many of us have an email system provided by our ISP – we are, in effect paying for this so why not use it?
I do have to say that I choose to download all of my mail to a local email client (I use Thunderbird but many people will be using Outlook as it comes free with Windows.)
This is what I do with my system…
Trusted Email
For email from famly and friends (in other words, trusted email), I use the email account provided by my ISP. This is… keith.eckstein@wanadoo.fr
I don’t trust wanadoo’s spam filters but then, I don’t have to. This is because I have set up a rule within Thunderbird so that the only mails that I receive are from email accounts on my whitelist. This is a list of the email addresses from family and friends.
Messages to my Wanadoo (Family and Friends account) that are not in my Personal Address Book get deleted! Pretty severe, I know but it does mean that anything I receive from Wanadoo is from a genuine sender.
General Email
For my general email, I use a Gmail account. This is keith.Eckstein@gmail.com
For this account, I do trust the anti-spam filters as I have found that the Gmail spam controls are the best I have come across.
I do know, though, that I have to be careful about trusting emails sent to this account. Luckily, most of them are genuine.
Spam Email
Finally, I have an account at Yahoo. This is keckstein2002@yahoo.co.uk
This is the account that I use for signing up to newsletters, for registering with sites and for anything that doesn’t involve a human being. Thus, everything I receive at this address is either computer generated or spam. No one that I know will ever use this address as I don’t hand it out to human beings.
By splitting my mail up into 3 accounts, I can be pretty sure that I don’t become a victim of spam.
Hiding your Email Address
In order to protect your email address from spambots, you should write it (where posible) like this….
keith.Eckstein@gmail.com
This gets displayed as… keith.Eckstein@gmail.com but the spambots looking for an @ symbol don’t realise that it is an email address.
. is the code for a full stop and @ is the code for the @ symbol
Thunderbird
I use Thunderbird to manage my email. Thunderbird is built by the Mozilla team and is available for both Linux and Windows systems. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
It’s difficult to see from the image on the left but, I manage multiple email accounts from within Thunderbird.
In addition (see image on the right), I use a number of different profiles in order to load functionally different email accounts (each of which may have a number of email addresses such as… contact@xtz.com • advertising@xyz.com etc.)
This allows me to keep the mailfiles small (and thus, easier to backup) and is easier for me to manage.
Conclusion
By having 3 different day to day email addresses, I can ensure that I don’t have to waste too much time sorting out spam from real mail. Anything that comes through on my Wanadoo account must come from allowed email addresses.
Anyhthing that comes through on my Yahoo account is almost certainly spam as I don’t give this acount out to any other human being.
Finally, my Gmail account may contain spam but I find that the Gmail spam filters do a very good job – it is only this acount that I have to worry about and I know that Family and Friends are not using it.
Where possible, I obfuscate my email address as described above.
All the best
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