Should I change my e-mail address?

[tcfrogs]

When I first signed up for my hotmail account in 1998, I used the same format as my job at the time. First initial-last [e-mail]. Lately, I'm getting at least 10-15 e-mails per day from mortgage/debt/misc. companies who are guessing (correctly) that I am the person corresponding to the name. The mortgage companies even guess my address correctly.

I know, I can set my inbox to show only e-mails from people I know. But, I subscribe to a few sports-related lists, and I'd miss a lot of the good correspondence.

What the hell should I do? Spam just sucks, although I can't decide if it's worse than spyware.

[salvorhardin]

1. Gmail baby!

GMail rocks! You can do filters and forwarding and everything. If you want a GMail account PM me with a real e-mail address and I'll send you an invite.

[tcfrogs]

4. I thought there were drawbacks to G-mail

Any? I can't remember...

[salvorhardin]

7. There's drawbacks to ALL webmail services

not just GMail. The primary drawback is that your e-mail is stored on a central server. With a POP account the only mail stored on the server is the mail since you last checked your inbox. When you do that your e-mail is downloaded and deleted from the server.

With webmail or IMAP accounts, the mail stays on the server. There are, of course, hugh privacy concerns with this, especially when you consider that a service like GMail offers 1GB of storage. This would make it really tempting for an intelligence agency to get access to all the webmail accounts on a single service and run data-mining software. Your e-mail could also be supoenaed. While the e-mail stored on your personal computer could also be supoenaed, if it's on your personal machine it makes it much easier to encrypt or even wipe if necessary.

GMail also advertises at you, although they are the easily ignored google text ads.

[lilymidnite]

2. Yes.

Take it from someone who's last name is the same as a holiday, change your email address.

I still keep my original account w/my ISP that I've had for 12 years, but have added another 'private' POP account, with a much less common ID (not in any dictionary) The difference in amount of spam is phenominal.

I haven't signed on to my Hotmail account in several years.

[2Design]

3. hotmail is worse spam - you can go to yahoo and get bigger

box and spam is handle well - put into bulk mail and most the time accurately -

I gave up on hotmail a year ago

[Aiptasia]

5. spyware is a worse evil

Spyware should be banned outright, although the patriot act probably keeps it legal for now. No one should be allowed to monitor and/or gather background information about me or anyone else that surfs the internet(s).

Think of your email addresses as disposable. I had an email address I used for business for over 10 years and when I finally terminated it, I was beeing flooded by well over 500 spam emails per day. It was so bad my spam filtering software took 10 minutes just to filter everything.

Now, I use multiple email accounts (mostly free ones from yahoo and lycos) and toss them when I need to.

[skygazer]

6. I get a ton of spam

And my e-mail name has nothing to do with any real name or anything remotely recognizable as such.