Anti-Spam Resources

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If you want to avoid to receive too much spam, and if you want to synchronize the use of your numerous email addresses, I offer you to have a look at the following advice.

1/ Notions

- A mail account is a "disk space" on which you can stock mail messages, that is to say text files. The access to this disk space is characterized by a login and a password.
- A mail address is an "information", that is to say a piece of data which allow others to send you messages.
- An identity is a set of informations, usually including a name, surname, mail address and a signature.

Traditionally, an account and an address are completely linked, provided by a mail provider such as Gmail, Hotmail, YahooMail, etc. Here, we invite you to distinguish the two concepts, to solve problems of spam and multiple personnal/professional addresses.

2/ Creating a secret account

The idea is to create a mail account, whose corresponding email address will be kept secret (you will not use it as an information for sending/receiving). This secret account will serve as your unique place for receiving, consulting, sorting, sending, for the whole set of your email addresses (existing or future).

You can create this account with the mail provider you want, but check that the service allows these functionnalities: folders creation, incoming mail sort according its headers, creation of multiple identities. For instance, let's create a mail account at Gmail.com : my_secret_address@gmail.com.

3/ Redirecting your addresses to secret account

Log into each of your usual mailboxes, and activate the forward of all your incoming messages towards the secret address.
- Example under Gmail: log into the account usual_address@gmail.com, go to "Settings", "Forwarding and POP", "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" : my_secret_address@gmail.com.
- Example under Hotmail: log into the account usual_address@hotmail.com, go to "Options", "Account Management", "Forward mails to another mail account" : my_secret_address@hotmail.com.

4/ Setting up your secret account

In the secret account, for each of your usual addresses, you can setup the 3 following steps:
- Create a "folder" usual_address (or "label" for Gmail) in my_secret_address@gmail.com
- Create a sorting filter in my_secret_address@gmail.com : redirection of all incoming messages containing "usual_address@gmail.com" in the field "To" towards the usual_address folder. So that all the mails forwarded from usual_address@gmail.com (see 3/) towards my_secret_address@gmail.com will arrive in the folder which has the same name.
- Create an identity "usual_address@gmail.com" (add a new address) in the account my_secret_address@gmail.com

5/ How to use your secret account

From now on, when you will write a new message ("Compose Mail"), you will be able to choose the identity (email address) through which you want to be known by your recipient (1st field, "From"). No need to log anylonger on the other mail accounts, since all the mails are redirected to my_secret_address@gmail.com and automaticly classified !

The following table describes the different kinds of mail addresses you can open, according the destination use that you will do with it. The best is that your provider offers the possibility for adding or removing your mail addresses as you wish. Another solution is to use a junk address such as jetable.org which provides short lifetime temporary email addresses. The advantage of the monthly email is that it's 100%-free of spam since it changes every month, which is not the case of a fixed address.

Email	Use	Recipient
your-name@domain.ext	To give to your friends who don't want to bother with the monthly system	physical person
your-name_month_year_@domain.ext	To give to your friends, even new friends, explaining they replace by the correct year and month	physical person
your-name-pub_month_year_@domain.ext	To give to any website subscription	website
your-name-ng01@domain.ext	To set some newsgroups or maillists contact mail, after having first set up your monthly pub address for a few weeks	website
your-name-myjob@domain.ext	To set up forward redirections from other email accounts to your main box	forward