Email is a wonderful means of communication; it's faster than the postal service (known to computer types as "snail mail", due to it's relative slowness), it's quick and easy to use and can be accessed anytime from anywhere you can find an internet connection.
When considering email and security there are a few things to talk about:
(Click a link to read about that item and then come back here.)
Once you have an understanding of the above items it will then be time to read one to find out about (fanfare) the CareOfWindowsXP recommended email address strategy!
The CareOfWindowsXP Email address strategy
With SPAM being such a problem it might seem the right thing to do is never give anyone your email address. As a strategy that's not bad but it misses one rather important point; the purpose of having an email address is to be able to exchange emails, both with friends and also as a means to receive updates from the various online forums and information sites. In theory any one of these sources could share your email address with a spammer (perhaps by listing it on a public site) and before you know it your email box is full of emails you don't want and can't stop.
Therefore what you need would seem to be a list of separate email addresses, all of which are yours, that you allocate out to the different email lists and online forums you have. That way if one of the addresses gets picked up by the spammers you can just drop that one (and perhaps the list it was subscribed to) and continue in your low or no-SPAM world.
So how do we do this?
What we're going to do is use one "real" email account, (ideally with a hard to guess name) and then a set of forwarded email addresses, all of which are different but all of which point back to the real email address. Typically your ISP provides a small number of email boxes for you (normally called "POP3" mailboxes). Choose one of these to be your "real" email address and point your email client to it. Then we need to register a domain name which will allow us to have lots of forwarded email addresses. 123-Reg provide an inexpensive high-quality service to do this, so we'll use them. Go to www.123-reg.com and create an account with them (you will need to give them your real email address). It's free to create an account. Then you should register a domain name with them; obviously you need to think of a domain name which you would like as part of your "public face". Choosing a name you like can take a little thought, but don't take too long, domain names are being registered at the rate of one every two seconds, so get in to secure yours as soon as you can! The cost is incredibly low, with .uk domains at around £3 per year and .com/.net around £10 per year (NB you should register for at least two years). Using the email forwarding option from the 123-reg control panel, set a catch-all address as your real email address. Then any emails sent to a name at your domain will be forwarded on to you automatically.
Here's a worked example for Brenda Wyatt.
Brenda's ISP supplied POP3 email address is brenda@myisp.com
She creates an account at
www.123-reg.com
and registers the domain "WyattMail.me.uk".
She sets up email forwarding via the 123-reg control panel to forward all emails
received to <something>@wyattmail.me.uk to brenda@myisp.com.
Now when she signs up to some forum or email list she gives an email address which is individual to that list. Let's say she registers with Amazon, she could register as "Amazon@wyattemail.me.uk". They will send emails to that address which will be forwarded to her brenda@myisp.com email address and she can read them as she wishes.
The nice thing about this system is that she has not had to go anywhere else to register the email address "Amazon@wyattemail.me.uk", 123-reg just sees the wyattemail.me.uk part and sends it on for her.
So what happens if she finds one of her email addresses is being targeted by spammers? Let's assume this happens to her "dodgylist@wyattemail.me.uk" email address. She then goes to 123-reg, logs in and goes to the control panel. She selects the email forwarding page, adds a fresh line with "dodgylist@wyattemail.me.uk" in it, clicks the "return to sender" checkbox and clicks "update". Now any email to this address will be returned to whence it came. Nice eh?
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