Claiming back your time from spam

Claiming back your time........dealing with spam and nuisance calls

What I had to do to deal with spam and nuisance calls which were eating away my precious days. I'm a single mum and I want my kids to know more than my back!

I used to post loads of articles which finished with a resource box/about me that included my email address. That way you get business, website visitors etc, but now I use an image file instead which doesn't succumb as easily to bots/harvesters, though I know my address is still on a lot of sites. Many forums are really badly designed as it's very easy to harvest active addresses, so I think before I post to any forum - how do they display contact info?

When I contact a website asking for info or have to log in somewhere, I use a specific email address that relates to them. If that gets out, I can refer to my database and go totally ballistic with that company for sharing info against their own privacy policy, or I send them an article on the law and they find they just lost my business and recommendations to others. I have unlimited aliases so this is really easy. If someone abuses a particular email address, I just put a filter on and they go straight into the held mail file and I don't see them again.

I still have the same primary address I had 11 years ago and the spam is unreal. I regularly clear out 5-10k+ spam a week, often more - Bill Gates gets 4 million a day, way to go! You ever wondered why MS are getting into the fight spam war?!

I pay $30/yr (which is nowt compared to the value I put on my time) for spamcop.net which seems to eliminate between 90 and 97% of all my emails but I only lose 1:1000 worthwhile emails to the spam filters, which took me 5 clickboxes to set up. It takes me a few minutes each week to delete all the spam from my Held mail file, except that I sometimes spend a while spotting the trends so I can warn my clients, friends, family etc.

I delete anything that has got through the spam filters (into my Spamcop Inbox) that I don't want before it gets sent to my email account. This way it doesn't clutter up my Eudora folders any more or waste bandwidth, and once everything comes in from my mail server it is filtered into folders anyway. Typically it's about 10% of each day's mails are crud and, depending on the number of mails, it takes a couple of minutes to delete them in Spamcop.

Because I have already scanned the emails I'm letting through, I can prioritise my day based on what I know is on its way or was sent overnight. On busy days, I do miss things, I know that, but that's just doing too much and being too interested in too many things!

I can let people know really quickly by phone that the mail they sent hasn't arrived. When you're dealing with info for press releases, website updates etc that are time critical, this matters. Spamcop is pretty fast, and I don't mind paying them for the service.

The days that are bad are when someone sends spam with false headers so it seems to come from one of my domains and I get all the bounces etc. But you just choose ALL, then unclick any mail in that delivery you want to keep. This type of activity can account for several thousand emails per 10 mins and it's a relief to be able to deal with them quickly (1,000 per 10-20secs now! My speed reading of subject lines has improved loads). Even with 2Mbps broadband, it used to take ages to download them and delete them from within Eudora, and some had nasty payloads which attacked my network.

There's another thing, I haven't seen a virus in months - touch wood. I've never used Outlook anyway but I get so many calls from people who don't understand the need for antivirus s/w and updates and a pukka firewall. And last time I got hit with a drop dialler was 8 years ago - bin your dial up before you get hit with calls to Paraguay!

Each time I report spam (a one click process), I get a warm glow and know I won't see them again! Because I get SO many mails and my address has been around a while, I think I might be one of those first in line for new spam and I like to think I might be able to stop them before they get everyone else.

I now post my 0845 efax.co.uk phone number to all websites, forums etc which goes to a virtual answer machine which emails me every msg. I rarely give out my landline or mobile unless I know the person/organisation. (The worst offenders for mobile spam seem to be TV programmes who ask you to vote. I've had to stop the kids doing it after I couldn't find privacy policies on the TV show websites.)

If there is no attachment on my voice msg email, I know no-one spoke and they all go in the trash folder en masse - highlight all, delete, bye. Ditto my fax number. All faxes arrive by email as .tif, and as no-one has asked for my fax number in months, I haven't printed one! Who sends faxes anyway these days?!! I empty that Eudora folder on a monthly or so basis without even looking at them.

I have gone from having to delete 25k msgs because I went skiing for a week, to actually waiting for emails to arrive because it's all gone quiet!! And I haven't had a nuisance call since I got my 0845 number. I'm not saying either of these services are the best, but it's what I researched and had to start using when it was taking me till Wednesday to clear the backlog of mails which had arrived over the weekend.

And now I have FREE TIME! Oh yes, look at it, time for bed!

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