In the past week or so I have gotten emails from several services stating that my email address may have been shared with spammers. We are assured that no financial information was shared, blah blah blah… but I may get more spam as a result. All of the companies affected use the email service provider Epsilon. I received emails from Walgreens, Target, Domestications, Harlem Furniture, Chase, and Best Buy. That means that since all of those companies released my address, I may have the potential to get 6 times more spam. GREAT!! Just what I need, even more spam than I get already. 🙂 Thanks!
I still say that I would love to get the spammers in a room and… Hmm… I'll have to think of a worthy punishment.
How can you protect yourself from spam? Well, if you use Gmail, Hotmail, or other free mail services, there are spam filters built-in. Although, I must say that the Yahoo one is pretty bad. I don't use that account much, but everything in my inbox is spam. It doesn't go to the spam folder.
People like me with their own domains that have an email address associated via their web host might want to log into cpanel (or similar) and make sure that the spam filter there is turned on as well. I use Hostgator now and the spam filter is Spam Assasin which seems to do a pretty good job. I have noticed that I get a lot less spam now than I did when I was on Hostmonster.
Another tip is to keep a junk email address that you use instead of your real address when having to signup on websites, unless of course it's something that you actually want to get in your main mail.
How do you manage your spam? Do you actually check the folder? I do, because every now and then an important email makes it there.
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