Spam is the new Boogeyman
Unless you're the sort of person who openly rejects technology and refuses to remain "connected" (although, I doubt you'd be here if you were), you will have noticed that spam is able to follow you around your daily duties. It's easier than ever to check your emails on the move and new communication methods are becoming popular, RSS on your PDA anyone? All of this means that you can remain connected anywhere, but it also means President Ghinjko of Zimbabwe can offer you a percentage of his $15,654,470,102,920 fortune.
While you have spam filters on your email (which are reasonably effective) other areas remain largely unprotected. Your mobile phone, for example.
SMS SpamThis week Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel subscribers (in the US) apparently received "unsolicited text messages" promoting stocks. How entirely unacceptable is that?! While you expect your email address to "do the rounds" because you have registered to 101 different companies using it, but your mobile phone is among the most personal communication devices available and to receive spam on it is a low point of this golden age of communication. Does this indicate that our mobile inboxes are likely to become spammed more in the future? Therefore meaning that wherever you are, spam is going to get you. Good news for those who find enjoyment in observing phishing in action, but for the majority of us it is a serious annoyance.
Spam is a scarier bedtime story...
Spam is coming at you through your door, through your email, through your SMS... If Futurama is to be believed then our dreams are next! So the next time you are telling a child a bedtime story, maybe the Boogeyman should be used for younger children who are too young to cope with the concept of an unstoppable evil that can get you at any time, anywhere in the world (with a signal obviously).
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The above results in little spam or spam-filter lose of focused messages and google filtering out thousands of spam messages of the generic account.
An added bonus is I conserve on the use of my computer resources and my time. I rarely give out any of my personal website addresses. I could use spam-assassin but if one were to get contaminated I would probably just redirect valid mail to a new account and delete the contaminated one. As for addresses that I would not want to change, I have been careful and lucky. Should I get unlucky I would be forced to follow in oil’s footsteps for that particular account but, thank God -- not all.
Google accounts are easy to come by these days but, if someone here needs an invite (not your nephew) -- email me at gdb.invite@ and mention our discussion here. You can use any old temporary account -- yahoo or whatever.
Between a funky server-side version of spam-assassin and ThunderBird everything* gets filtered out.
Plus I use positive foldering so messages for "so and so" go in the "so and so" folder. Magic.
*no spam = less than 1 per week