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Tired of Spam? Get sneaky…

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Microsoft is serious about spam, but one can always use more help. I’ve been using Sneakemail since my senior year of college. It works great. Create an account on sneakemail. When a web site asks for your email address instead of giving them your actual ISP account, go to sneakemail and create a forwarding address. They do some clever tricks to handle replies from your favorite email application while still protecting your address.

 

The best advice to avoid spam: don’t create obvious email addresses. BobJ@anything will get nailed. You’re better off using a mix of letters and numbers. Avoid common words and names all together. Think strong password: easy to remember, hard to guess.

 

To my knowledge, Microsoft does not recommend any email spam solutions (besides our own). This is my own experience, your mileage may vary, etc.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2004

    Thanks for the tip! Shall try it out.

    -raj
  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2004
    Is this a method people use to spam people as well? I find that I get the same (appearance wise) e-mails from multiple people with erroneous addresses that consist of numbers and letters that look like giberous.
  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2004
    I'm not exactly sure what your asking, Jonathan.

    What I mean by obscuring your email address: if your name is John Patrick Moore make your email JoPatMo@domain.com

    You'll be much less likely to get spammed.
  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2004
    It could also help if you have more chars in the address. I'd say 7 or more should be good.
  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2004
    I think you could further secure your email address if you changed it every 30 days, like a password. Harder to guess, right?

    But in reality, you have to give out your email address to human being people units, who can successfully process random character streams with about an 80% success rate (informal study). The other twenty percent you will lose forever, because they couldn't email 'y3945hdk35@yahoo.com' properly. Or my personal favorite: '0oo0oOO00oO0@yahoo.com'.


    So yeah, I definitely agree that you should use the junkmail address, but I don't agree that you should make your email address impossible for humans to parse.
  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2004
    I agree with you PDS.

    My point was making your email address hard to guess, but still easy to remember...like a good password.

    The example I give above: I admit JoPatMo@ is not as easy to remember as JohnM@ but it's probably much less likely to be the target of a dictionary search for spam victims. It makes sense to consider this trade-off when you're picking.

    You do the same trade-off with a password. I know that a 30 char password would be much harder to guess than my current 8-char one, but I'm not planning on changing any time soon.