For the third and fourth quarter of 2008, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group reported that approximately 90% of all eMail was spam. That’s an incredible number. It clearly demonstrates how much time and energy must be wasted to receive, identify and get rid of spam.

While spam protection has become quite effective at recognizing unsolicited bulk eMail, it’s still impossible to filter out and stop receiving spam.

Besides regular spam, we receive a lot of advertising in our inboxes. Although these eMails are often personalized, they still classify as spam. However, these eMails were usually created based on information we made available about ourselves, rather than straight forward eMail guessing.

Hence, one way to help stop receiving spam is to control the information you’re releasing about yourself. The best way to do this is to protect and hide your eMail address.

1. Scramble your eMail address

We often have to share our eMail address online. So what can be done to make it difficult for a bot to simply copy the information?

Rather than publishing your eMail address in its standard format, you could scramble and thereby conceal it. It requires an attentive and intelligent mind to recognize a scrambled eMail address and re-assemble it into a functional format.

A scrambled eMail address can look something like this: tina at make use of dot com

And this is the unscrambled eMail address: tina@makeuseof.com

2. Hide your eMail address in an image

A similar solution is to hide the eMail address within an image. There are several tools that will do this for you. One which provides many other functions is EmailCover.

Not only does it produce an image containing your eMail address in a CAPTCHA format, it also hosts the image and provides you with a set of links you can use to embed the image in your website, signature or on social network sites. Using the bookmark feature you can directly share your eMail address with the most popular sites. Finally, the tool records how often the image has been viewed.

Similar tool: E-Mail Icon Generator.

If you want to be sure only the smartest people can guess your eMail address, combine 1 and 2.

3. Encode your eMail address

If you must post an active eMail link, for example to give people a quick and easy way to contact you, you can encode your eMail address in a way that is not readable by spambots, which extracts eMail addresses from websites.

MailTO Encoder will decode your eMail address using Javascript. The result is a rather unsexy gibberish of characters.

Similar tools: E-mail Anti-SPAM Encoder (no Javascript), Hivelogic Enkoder

4. Hide eMail behind a test

With a tool called scr.im, you can protect your eMail address by hiding it behind a simple test.

At scr.im’s start page you enter your eMail address and the site will provide you with an ultra short scrimmed URL, along with custom HTML to share your eMail address on Twitter, Facebook, within HTML documents and in forums.

The link will lead anyone needing your eMail address to a quick test. If they manage to pass the test, they will be rewarded with a fully active link to your eMail address.

Similar tool: reCAPTCHA, tinymail.me

5. Don’t share your eMail address

The last resort is to not share your eMail address at all. Set up temporary inboxes or forms through which you can be contacted indirectly.

For example whspr! allows you to create a temporary form, which will relay messages to your eMail address. Users have to prove they are human by passing a CAPTCHA test.

Similar tools: kontactr, contactify

Summary of tools mentioned in this article:

Hide eMail address in image:
EmailCover
E-Mail Icon Generator

Encode eMail address:
MailTO Encoder (Javascript)
E-mail Anti-SPAM Encoder
Hivelogic Enkoder (Javascript)

Hide eMail address behind test:
scr.im
reCAPTCHA
tinymail.me

Contact forms:
whspr! (temporary)
kontactr
contactify

MakeUseOf has previously reported on how to identify and manage eMail spam. Dean denounced Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About. Ryan explained How To Deal with Spam and Report Email Scams in the US. I outlined how to Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You.

How do you protect yourself from too much spam?

Image credits: mzacha, ItsMe1985

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• How to Make Your Hotmail Sign In More Secure (6)
• How To Deal with Spam and Report Email Scams in The U.S. (5)
• 1 Awesome Gmail tip You Don’t Know about. Seriously. (262)
• Quickly Create Temporary Email Addresses with YopMail (21)
• Online Resources To Battle Frauds, Urban Legends & Spam (9)

Recognizing an Email Scam

People are constantly receiving emails for things like male enhancement products (what’s that all about anyway?) or for hotel and travel deals and other offers, but the really nasty emails are the ones you get that try to trick you into parting with your money. A few examples of the most common scams include:

• The Nigerian email scams
• The PayPal Scams
• Foreign Money Transfer scam
• Check out my webcam scam
• Pyramid Chain Letters

In almost every case, the email comes from a con artist who’s intent on taking you for as much as they can. In the case of the Nigerian scam, folks have actually traveled overseas to collect what they believe are multi-million dollar cheques, only to either get kidnapped or robbed. The Paypal scams fool countless Internet users every year into entering their Paypal logon information and emptying their accounts.

The other scams are all similar – a promise of a large electronic transfer into your bank account if you provide your bank account details, links to websites that install a trojan keyboard logger script that can capture your credit card information when you visit your online bank  account. According to a 2009 survey by the Consumer Federation of America, about 2 percent of email users exposed to “fake check” scams actually responded to them with a loss totally about $3000 to $4000 each.

Protecting Yourself From Email Scammers

The first step in protecting yourself from these con artists is by using your email account in a way that doesn’t put you at risk. If a company that you do business with sends you an email that offers a link where you can click to log into their account – don’t click it! Open up a separate browser, type in the URL, and log in. There’s never a need to click on any link in an email. One of the fastest ways to identify such a scam email is by using an email client that displays the link when you hover your mouse over it. You’ll see that in every case the actual link is never the same as the legitimate company’s website.

Tracking Down the Culprit

If you have the time, dedication and passion to take a stand against these spammers and con artists, there are a few tools you can use to track them down and report email scams. The first step is to trace the email to the source. Stefan wrote an excellent article on how to trace emails, and that’s where you should start.

In most cases, spammers try pretty hard to hide their identity using various methods, including “spoofing” the header with bogus information, using proxy servers to hide their location of origin, or using hijacked “spam-bot” home or business computers or misconfigured SMTP servers. However, there are times when the sender won’t be very smart, they’ll mess up or best of all they may not even properly cloak their IP at all.

Even if you can’t extract their originating IP and location, you may still be able to determine:

• Which infected computer is serving as the spam-bot
• Which mis-configured company smtp server is hijacked
• Which internet service provider is allowing the spammer to send out unsolicited mass emails
• Which proxy server (or servers) were used to attempt a “cloaked” identity
• Whether an anonymous email service was used to send the illegal scam message

You can also find some great resources for tracing emails and locating the spammers at Spam.Abuse.net. And of course make sure to support the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) which works to promote legislation against unsolicited spam. Since 2000, more and more states have created some excellent laws – and the more legislation there is moving forward, the more successful you’ll be in the next stage of this process, which I like to call… Fighting Back.

Fighting Back – How to Report Email Scams

Finally, depending on what information you can extract from the header, you can follow the steps below to shut down the scammers one spam-bot or SMTP server at a time, and in some cases you can even earn some extra money taking the scammers to court. Don’t believe it? Steve, over at AngryOx.com, successfully sued a company for spam.

On April 7 of this year, he collected a check from PrintPal for $623.54. Why did they have to pay? Because they willingly used a spammer to send unsolicited email, against the current laws of the state of Virginia. Businesses beware – users no longer have to try to chase down that elusive shadowy scammer through forged headers and proxies. If your company is advertised, then you’re busted. So don’t purchase the service of spammers or you’ll end up in court!

Steve even offers a free template for a settlement letter that you can use when you file your small claims lawsuit against the spammer. Just search the spam email for any links to purchase a product or that advertises a legitimate site. That’s the company you should go after if you choose this tactic in your war against spam.  In the case of the scams, it’s a different story. However, the laws are still on your side.

• A Forged Header: Even if the spammer tried to forge the header, uses a proxy or uses an anonymous email service – once you have a court proceeding, you can issue each of those entities legal documents that require them (in most cases) to open up their logfiles and provide the court with the identity of the spammer who used their service or server. Also check out JunkBusters technique of issuing “Notification and Offer” letters to spammers in order to force a lawsuit if the spammer doesn’t comply with a request for payment for every unsolicited message sent to your email account.
• If it’s a pyramid money scheme or “deceptive,” as in attempting to steal your money in some manner – report it to the FTC in addition to filing your own lawsuit. They’ve been known to go after major spammers, and your report could make a big difference in alerting them to a significant scamming operation.

Of course, the most important thing you can do to protect yourself in the first place is to filter out the spam. Tina’s article on how to get a grip on spam or Will’s article on five free “throwaway” email services that can help, are both excellent guides that can help reduce or eliminate spam.

To find out if you have the right to sue spammers (and make quite a bit of money in the process), check out SpamLaws.com for the laws in your state that limit spam. Many of these are from 2003 or later, so you may have legal rights regarding spam that you don’t even realize. Suing the spammers, or the businesses that hire them is one of the most effective ways to put an end to this madness once and for all.

Have you ever successfully tracked down a spammer? What tools or techniques did you use? Share them with us in the comments.

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• Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About (25)
• Online Resources To Battle Frauds, Urban Legends & Spam (9)
• How To Stop Spammers From Getting Your Private Info from Forums or Blogs (20)
• How to Make Your Hotmail Sign In More Secure (6)
• Facebook Impostors – Tips For Your Profile To Stay Safe From Scammers (8)

I see these horrible emails flying around my servers on a daily basis. They not only clog up mail servers and cause people to be spammed – they also cause damage to computers and propagated just like a virus.

I would say that 99 out of 100 of these emails are fake with no sustainable claims in the real world. Joe Shmoe gets an email from his mother telling him that we can end world hunger by forwarding this message to everyone in your address book and urge them to do them same. If we do this every email will generate $1000 for hungry children… How can people think these things are real? People are very gullible. Heck, I told my assistant that they took the word gullible out of the dictionary, and she went to look it up!

Long story short – we should always verify a story before sending it on to our friends and co-workers. And that is why I am going to show you how to verify Urban Legends and Email Scams.You do not want to be the dude who sent out the email that caused the entire company’s network to go down.

There are a few sites that I use to verify (or usually disprove) these hoax emails that flood my inbox daily. Tina wrote about a few back in March. The most famous and widely used one is Snopes.com.

Snopes.com is set up in a way that you can search for a block of text from the message or entertain yourself by browsing through known hoaxes. Simply go to www.snopes.com and type in something from the hoax. If we were trying to disprove the Microsoft story, we might type in Microsoft.

And sure enough, there it is at the top.The hoax email we were looking for is number 1. So, let’s click on it and see what it has to say.

Right at the top, we see a red dot that says FALSE. Then, below it are variations of the message that have gone out. This one started in 2004 but it is still alive and kicking due to people not knowing what hoaxes and email scams are.

Snopes normally has everything listed but we will also give you a few backup sites to check your facts against.

www.truthorfiction.com is another great site for de-bunking hoaxes. It works the same way as Snopes does. Let’s try it out:

I searched for the great American hoax that Barrack Obama could not run for President because he was not a US citizen. Check out what TruthOrFiction returned on this page http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/l/lawyersues.htm

Questions About Barack Obama’s status as a “natural born citizen” – Truth! Fiction! & Unproven!

Obama’s Occidental College Transcripts released – Fiction! Possible April Fools Joke!

Summary of the eRumor:
A variety of articles, lawsuits rumors that question whether Barack Obama is eligible to be President of the United States base on his citizenship.

The Truth:

Update May 5 2009: A new Obama citizenship story story claiming to be from the Associated Press saying that a group called “Americans for Freedom of  Information” released copies of Occidental College transcripts showing that the “Fulbright Foundation” had awarded Barack Obama, under the name of Barry Soetoro, financial aid to attend Occidental College.  This claims to be the “Smoking Gun” to the rumor about his natural born citizen status.   The eRumor began circulating in April 2009 and by the end of the month reached critical mass.  There is no such story by the Associated press and looking at the dateline this appears to be an April Fools joke.

An Occidental College spokesperson told TruthorFiction.com that President Obama’s records are still sealed and no such transcripts have been released.   When asked if the future President used the Obama or Soetoro name at the college, the spokesperson said that although he had not seen the sealed transcripts he had seen a 1981 photo book that was handed out to students and faculty at the beginning of the college year with student photos, names and hometown information.  The 1981 photo book had “Barack Obama” under the student’s photo and indicated a home state as Hawaii.

And they go on and on, to let you know a little bit of the back story behind it. But right off the bat, we see it is not true and we should not forward it to the board of directors!

And just in case you can not find what you are looking for there, you can also check out http://www.breakthechain.org/ and http://www.vmyths.com/. Some of the anti-virus companies list hoaxes as well — like Sophos and Symantec but they tend to be a little bit outdated. But between these four resources and your own anti-virus’ website, you should be able to determine if it is a hoax or not. And when in doubt, post them in the comments and we will debunk them for ya! And that is how we Verify Urban Legends and Email Scams. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Do you have another favorite website or database for sniffing out hoaxes? Aware of any faster or better way to verify urban legends and email scams? If you do, let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About (25)
• Threats In Your Email – Are They Real or Not? (6)
• Online Resources To Battle Frauds, Urban Legends & Spam (9)
• How To Deal with Spam and Report Email Scams in The U.S. (5)
• 5 Ways to Protect & Hide Your Email to Stop Receiving Spam (20)

Those same bots are now a lot smarter… No we shouldn’t be bowing down to our alien overloads just yet but we might have to step up our practice of hiding our email addresses or other information you might want to send to someone but not let it get harvested by some Malware from their inbox.

Enter www.HideText.net. HideText does a very simple job and at the same time helps users FOR FREE. Now if you want to post your email address somewhere for HUMANS to contact you – you can use HideText to automagically create an image with your text. This can not be parsed by bots (YET!) and is great for emailing data you would not want to fall in to the wrong hands (This is of course if there are NO OTHER means of transferring your data.)

Let’s see how it works.

After browsing on over to the site decide if you want to create a text image or a simple image for your email address. I started by typing in some super secret data into the text box like so…

And then to hide my text in an image I can select one of two fonts, the size and then click Hide It! You can see the results below:

When I click the link to my image: http://www.hidetext.net/hide/1YJUSqYWRq.gif

I see this:

And if I right click on it and get properties:

And it is impossible to copy and paste the text! Nice. Now let’s see how they handle single email addresses…

I put in my information regarding my HEAVILY spammed gmail account… And Hit Hide It!

What a pretty graphic it creates using your mail provider’s logo. My image is here:

Not bad at all! As long as they aren’t transcribing our text and selling it to a third party We didn’t find a privacy policy but we did find this FAQ list that calmed us down a bit:

• How long will my files be stores?
  Forever, at least if they’re accessed once per year.
• Are there any limits of how much text can I throw in?
  We threw in some some complete books from the gutenberg project, and they work out just fine.
• This is all swell, but how do I know if you guys are not peeping into my stuff?!
  We’ve got better things to do, really. We’re just not interested.
• Why did you make this site?
  We made it for ourselves and figured it could be useful for everyone.
• Is anything logged here? Are the files really deleted?
  Yes, they’re just deleted and nothing is logged here.
• Why am I reading this?
  Well if you don’t even know, how could we?

How are you hiding your email address or avoiding spammers? Let us know in the comments!

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• How To Deal with Spam and Report Email Scams in The U.S. (5)
• Quickly Create Temporary Email Addresses with YopMail (21)
• How to Make Your Hotmail Sign In More Secure (6)
• Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You (12)
• Five Free Temporary Email Services To Avoid Spam (27)

Maybe you need to fill in an email for a one-time registration that, you are sure, will only lead to spam. That is where temporary email services come into play. Today we will talk about 5 of those that I highly recommend.

Here they are (in no particular order):

Mailinator

Mailinator is definitely one of my favorite temporary email services. Besides providing the standard temporary email, Mailinator offers RSS feeds, a widget for use on your website, the ability to delete messages – just in case someone else is using the same email, alternative emails for each individual email, and 7 domains to use that all redirect to the same email (just in case someone inconveniently blocked @mailinator.com)

YopMail

YopMail has a more advanced user interface than most other temporary email services that makes it look almost like a realistic webmail. Of course there are many features, including: RSS feeds, ability to delete messages, widgets, a realistic email viewer (with all of the functions of a full blown webmail), and the ability to send messages to other @ yopmail.com accounts. Read more on Yopmail at here.

MintEmail

MintEmail is another extremely simple and easy to use temporary email service that definitely makes temporary email fast. Simply click “Create New Mailbox” and immediately you have a new, randomly generated temporary email address for use anywhere on the web. Emails are kept for 3 hours, but can be easily extended. Another great feature of MintMail, is the ability to forward emails to any other email address for a certain amount of time to get only the few emails you need without having to constantly check MintMail.

FilzMail

FilzMail offers the standards of many temporary email services with RSS feeds, clean interface, and a long-lasting email – in comparison to other temporary email services (24 hours). You can either set your own temporary email address or get a randomly generated temporary address that is automatically updated.

10MinuteMail

10MinuteMail offers users the ability to use a randomly generated, free 10 minute temporary email address that should definitely fill the need of a fast, simple, and one-time temporary email address quite easily (and it automatically updates too!).

What do you use for that quick temporary email service? Tell us in the comments!

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• Quickly Create Temporary Email Addresses with YopMail (21)
• Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You (12)
• How To Stop Spammers From Getting Your Private Info from Forums or Blogs (20)
• How To Deal with Spam and Report Email Scams in The U.S. (5)
• 5 Ways to Protect & Hide Your Email to Stop Receiving Spam (20)

The easiest way to avoid being scammed or multiply false information is to always mistrust mass mails, unrequested offers or small print. I believe you guys reading MakeUseOf find it rather easy to spot when something’s wrong and I believe you all know that a search engine is the best place to test your hypothesis should you have any doubts.

Google reveals that there are many websites that collect the story behind the fraud or that uncover legends and myths as such. These sites can be both helpful and entertaining.

Let’s have a look at the best…

Ripoff Report

Ripoff Report was founded in an effort to fight unethical behavior among people. The website has been operating since 1998 and is available to users worldwide.

If you as a consumer has had trouble with a company, this is where you can share your frustration and warn other potential customers.

For the less experienced consumer and internet user the site has a collection of helpful tips what to do or not to do. The Consumer Tips addresses issues like how to protect your identity, spot work-at-home scams or avoid telephone cramming.  An excellent resource you should point anyone to, who mindlessly forwards such offers to you.

Snopes

Ever heard the story that Jamie Lee Curtis genetically is a male or a hermaphrodite? Since there is neither a proof for nor against this case, it cannot be said for sure, but this story appears to be an urban legend.

Snopes has been uncovering urban legends since 1995 and quite frankly is a fantastic source for online entertainment. The main site features a Top 15 list of legends on the left and a rich selection of categories in the center.

If someone tells you a story you’re not so sure of, go ahead and search Snopes. And if you think you have uncovered a myth that is not yet listed on Snopes, become a part of the supporting crew and submit the rumor, photo or video in question.

BreakTheChain

Chain emails are the worst. Fake virus warnings, false missing child reports or scary threats such as “forward or die“. Yeah right!

Please don’t foster the chain, break it! You can easily verify whether or not the chain is valid at BreakTheChain by using the search feature and a few keywords.

So these are the best three sites from my point of view. Of course there are many more. Either way, next time you come across a doubtful email, don’t just discard it. Take a moment to educate the sender with a link back to the respective article on one of those sites.

Also next time you have a bad experience as a customer, don’t just let it go, rather second a previous post of a similar issue or spread the word and you may keep someone else from making the same mistake.

What is the last scam or myth you (almost) fell for?

Picture credit: mattosense

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• How To Deal with Spam and Report Email Scams in The U.S. (5)
• Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About (25)
• Threats In Your Email – Are They Real or Not? (6)
• 5 Ways to Protect & Hide Your Email to Stop Receiving Spam (20)
• 2 Websites to Verify Urban Legends and Email Scams (6)

So what can you do? And how can you remove false information from the internet and ultimately remove that info from Google.

What is Libel?

In the United States and in many countries around the world, truthful statements about another person are safe to publish. However, publishing outright lies with the intent to defame or injure the reputation of others is illegal.

In the U.S., the victim of libel has the right to bring a civil lawsuit against the defamer. Such lawsuits are usually very expensive and not worth the effort for most people. If you find that someone has published untrue information about you online, there are less expensive and more effective ways to remove that false libelous information from the web.

Beg For Mercy

Before you do anything else, swallow your pride and contact the person who published the information. Locate the contact details on the website if you can, and send a friendly email pointing out why what they wrote is untrue. Don’t call them a liar, just ask them if they wouldn’t mind entering into a friendly dialog with you regarding the issues that were published. You’d be surprised how many of these situations arise out of a gross misunderstanding. Communicating with the other person can immediately clear up any disagreements you may have had, and you may discover that the author is willing to remove the hurtful page. Kindness can often go a very long way to getting what you want.

Unfortunately, the odds are pretty good that you may be dealing with an unstable or unreasonable individual. They may get obnoxious and rude in response to you, and refuse to cooperate. That’s when it’s time to step it up a notch.

Shut Em’ Down

Before you conduct full-fledged warfare against the offending website, you’ll need to do a little bit of investigating. The first step is to identify the name and contact information for the person who registered the site that hosts the libelous material. Personally I like the Domaintools Whois Lookup because it provides detailed information about the website. The results you get back from a whois search will look like the results below.

The two items that you need are “Admin Email,” and towards the top of the listing, Domaintools also reports the host company in the “Server Data” section as shown here. The admin email listed above is the address you’ll need to contact the webmaster if no contact emails were listed on the website.

Once you know the name of the web hosting company, visit the website and obtain their contact information as well as a list of their Terms and Conditions. Make a list of those terms that you can determine the offending webmaster has broken on his website.

#1 – Report All Terms & Conditions Violations to the Host

If you’ve contacted the webmaster and they are unwilling to cooperate, then the first part of this battle will be firing off as many abuse violation reports as needed. Your first order of business is to report a violation to their web host. It’s important that you find a violation on the web page that goes against the terms and conditions of the host. Most web hosts do not allow libel or copyright infringement.

For example, Hostdime, the web host of the offending site listed above, provides an “Unauthorized Personal Material” claim form. One of the first things HostDime will do when they receive such a report is to “Expeditiously remove or disable access to the personal material that is claimed to be unauthorized.” This occurs immediately! There is no faster way to remove a website with libel on it. All you need to do is find any place on the website where the author makes use of your name, personal information or any other “personal material,” without your permission.

Usually you’ll need to send in the notice via snail mail, so do so as soon as possible. Wait a week or so, and then follow-up with an email to make sure they received it okay, and to let them know that you’re very serious and expect a prompt response. You should notice the website go down within just a week or two.

#2 – Report Privacy or Copyright Infringement To Google

Another approach is to remove information from Google and get that web page delisted from the search engines. Google is the powerhouse of online search rankings, so getting delisted from Google would virtually destroy any chance the offending website would have of getting any visibility. There are specific situations when Google will willingly remove the site from their listings. Those situations include when any of the following are published on a web page:

* Your social security or government ID number
* Your bank account or credit card number
* An image of your handwritten signature
* Your name or business published on an adult content site spamming Google’s search listings.
* Infringement of copyrighted content like text or images

In most cases you can use Google’s web page removal request tool to submit your request to Google.

#3 – Report Any Other Abuse to Google

If the website that’s posted libel about you hasn’t broken any privacy rules, you still have a chance of removing their site from Google if you can find a case of abuse related to Google’s Terms and Conditions. Search the website and try to find examples of any of the following.

* If the site is just spam
* If the site buys or sells links
* If the site is infected with malware or malicious software

If you can identify any of the above activities on the website, submit a report to Google using the Spam Report Tool.

Don’t Give Up

One of the most important things you can do when you’re looking to take down libelous content about yourself online is to be persistent and tenacious. In 2006, a person seeking to libel me sent out my personal information to a mass list of over 200 email addresses. By following the guidelines in this article, I was able to trace down the sender’s ISP, and after submitting an official report for both spam and distribution of private information – the spammer’s ISP issued him a warning and removed his Internet access for a full week. It was very sweet retribution.

Have you ever had to remove libel about yourself from the Internet? What tools or tricks did you use to do it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• WhoCalled.US Tells You About That Call You Missed (US Only) (10)
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Example time:

Let’s say that I want to sign up for PossiblyShadySite.com but don’t want to give out my real email address, potentially passing it to spammers. Instead, I register with the address

For those who prefer to use their own domain, that option is also available. All messages to my custom address will fall into its own folder in your OtherInbox, where you can read, archive, search, and reply to them in a nice Outlook-style layout.

Note to self…see if “PossiblyShadySite.com” is taken. Now where was I?

You can do this with a seemingly-infinite number of sites.

- save your Amazon receipts in amazon@myusernname.otherinbox.com
- filter your eBay auto-searches into eBay@myusernname.otherinbox.com
- use separate email just for signups, say em>signups@myusernname.otherinbox.com
- etc.

Best part about this is that there are no filters to set up; you do not have to go to the OtherInbox site ahead of time to create the address. For instance, right after signing up (got username makeuseof) I sent myself 3 emails to following addresses:

- test1@makeuseof.otherinbox.com
- test2@makeuseof.otherinbox.com
- test3@makeuseof.otherinbox.com

When I logged in to OtherInbox I saw each of those emails in its own Inbox. Sweet.

In the event that you begin to receive unsolicited mail in a particular inbox, you have the option of hitting the big “Block All” button, which disables that address. You’ll never see mail from them again. The option to turn a disabled inbox back on is there if needed.

Checking multiple sites for your mail is a chore, and OtherInbox seems to understand that. Additional options allow you to auto-forward all incoming mail to another address, or (my favorite) read your messages via RSS.

The same options are available for individual inboxes, along with the vice-versa option, importing an RSS feed to an inbox.

OtherInbox can also import messages from any IMAP account, auto-saving and organizing receipts, coupons, etc. I’m told that there is currently no limit to the amount of messages that can be saved in your OtherInbox account.

Being a beta, it can be prone to the occasional hiccups, but I have no real complaints about the service. I believe that once you have been using OtherInbox for just a few days, you will wonder what you did without it.

I’m also happy to announce that the nice folks at OtherInbox have opened up their beta to the first 100 Make Use Of readers to sign up through this link. You may also follow their Twitter account for the chance to score an invite, or simply to send them feedback.

So why not set up an account and then come back here and let us know what you think? Do you see this as the new weapon against email spam?

Make Use Of has written a lot on email spam but here are a couple of posts you might want to check out

- Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You
- Quickly Create Temporary Email Addresses with Yopmail.

Enjoy!

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• Create An Automatic Email Response With Gmail’s New Filter (3)
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To get started, just download the addon for your browser. If you’re using Firefox or IE, download and install this search addon. Once it’s installed, just select YopMail.com from your search drop-down list. Enter in a random string of characters, and that will become your @yopmail.com email address. Hit enter, and you’ll be taken to the mailbox for that address. Couldn’t be easier!

Opera users can download this widget. Once it’s installed, open the widget and click the “lightning” button to generate a random address. Then click the Mailbox button and Opera will open a new tab and display your newly created mailbox.

Creating random temporary email addresses is perfect for those web signup forms if you don’t want to get hit by spam mail. If you value your privacy online, these browser addons are perfect for creating one-off “use them then toss them” email addresses.

You might also want to check out 5 “DISPOSABLE” Web Accounts to Keep Your Identity Safe by Aibek and Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You by Tina.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You (12)
• Five Free Temporary Email Services To Avoid Spam (27)
• The Winners of ‘Extend Firefox’ – Best Firefox Addons (14)
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It is a dark and stormy night. You are home all alone and the phone rings while you are watching the latest horror flick. You jump out of your seat; a little scared and walk to the phone.

But you missed it and they hung up on your voice mail. You look down at the caller ID and see a strange phone number with an unfamiliar area code.

What do you do?

Most people would call that number back. But you forget I am a geek and I like to do things a little differently. I would grab my tablet and bring up the website Who Called Us.

This website allows you to type in the number that called you and see what other people know about this phone number.

I don’t know how helpful this site is but it lets you know that you are not alone and the phone calls are not coming from “INSIDE THE HOUSE!”.

So you pop in that number that called you. In my case it was 425-391-5973. A quick search revealed that 36 other people had recently gotten similar calls from this number and a few people actually got someone on the line preaching about extended auto warranties.

Now I don’t have to worry that some random old friend is trying to send me secret messages by hanging up the phone in a specific sequential order…

I can simply curse out the voice spammers under my breath and add my comment to the WhoCalled.us list.

According to their website, here are their statistics from the last 3 years:

There have been 612237 calls reported in total.
The last 100 calls are shown below.

This database of calls has been graciously provided by the community.
Thank you for taking the time to add to the pool of knowledge.

That is pretty impressive and this website can be a great resource to everyone in the United States. Do you guys in other countries have a similar tool? How do you deal with Voice Spam?

(By) Karl L. Gechlik is a superhero of the IT industry who wears many hats and changes in telephone booths. Karl mostly uses his powers for good and the occasional hysterical prank. Get your geek on & follow his geeky antics at askTheAdmin.com today.

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• Create Free Temporary Phone Numbers Easily with INumbr (6)
• Block Calls On Your BlackBerry with CallsBlocker (23)
• Quickly Create Temporary Email Addresses with YopMail (21)
• How To Stop Spammers From Getting Your Private Info from Forums or Blogs (20)
• How to Remove False Information about Yourself on Internet (38)

I. Organize your eMail accounts

This is the most difficult part since it requires some serious thought and discipline. Set up different accounts for different purposes. Use one for friends and family and never post it online. Try to do the same for work. Use other accounts for shopping online, social networks, chat friends, message boards etc. It’s tedious at first, but if you’re using Pop mail, it’s easy to manage multiple accounts.

When creating your eMail address be creative, don’t use words found in a dictionary, combine with numbers or letters. The reason is that most spam doesn’t reach your inbox because your address was extracted from a dubious source. Rather you are being spammed randomly by so-called dictionary attacks on your eMail provider.

II. Mask your eMail address

Fortunately, most spam bots are stupid. For example they don’t recognize eMail addresses typed with spaces or displayed in images. There are several excellent tools that may help you to protect your eMail address and keep it spam free:

1. Hide your eMail address in an image.It requires some level of intelligence to copy text from an image.

Tool: Spam Proof eMail Generator

2. Hide your eMail address behind a CAPTCHA.

Again, whoever wants to access your eMail address needs to be smart enough to pass the test.

Tool: MailHide ReCaptcha

3. Hide your eMail address in a contact form.

This will not reveal your eMail address at all.

Tools: Kontactr, ReachBy and Contactify

III. Use temporary or fake information

How many times a week do you sign up for something new online, and how many times will you keep coming back to that service? Temporary eMail addresses are a great solution to avoid sharing your eMail address in the first place. Should you decide to stick with that service, you can still give them your valid address later on. Again, there are numerous sites to consider.

1. Spam Motel.

My personal favorite. You sign up a permanent account with them and create temporary eMail addresses as you need them. Mail is being forwarded to your real address. Once spam finds you, you cancel the address it’s coming through and start over. There is a similar tool called GishPuppy , however the signup form didn’t work for me.

2. Spamgourmet

It’s one of many similar services. It creates a disposable eMail on the spot which automatically expires after having forwarded three messages. You need to sign up with Spamgourmet to use it.

3. MintEmail

Here you can create a temporary address that will expire after four hours or after three months. What’s cool is that the four hour address is automatically created and saved to your clipboard once you enter the page. The page proceeds to constantly check for incoming mail on that address. The concept is awesome. However, while testing my test eMail had not arrived after over one hour. Hopefully a temporary issue.

4. BugMeNot

Step out of the vicious eMail cycle and use disposable login data, including an invalid eMail address.

IV. Filter Spam

Chances are you have an eMail address that is already being spammed but you don’t want to part with it. Depending on how you check your mail you can either manually teach your mail program to better recognize spam or, in case you’re using POP mail or IMAP, you can use a tool that sits between your eMail provider and your inbox to filter incoming eMail.

1. Writing Mail Filters

This article from Spamnation gives excellent directions on how to decrease the amount of spam that reaches your inbox with a step by step guide.

2. Spamihilator

A free Windows tool that works with POP3 and IMAP accounts. Spamihilator claims to identify more than 98% of incoming spam mail. You can help to increase its success rate by customizing the settings, such as adding words to the Spam Words list, enabling the DCC-Filter to recognize unsolicited bulk mail, add your friends’ eMail addresses, and install plugins to further improve the overall performance.

Standard mail programs are recognized automatically (although it can take ages), those that are not supported can be set up manually.

The online documentation for every aspect of the program is very thorough and clear.

V. Use Gmail

Gmail comes with a few nifty features that can make your life a lot easier. First of all the default Gmail spam filter is pretty good. Then you can use a single Gmail account and have multiple eMail addresses with it. Just sort them into different folders to effectively separate spam from real mail. You can track and block spammers by adding cue words to your eMail address when signing up anywhere. Read more in Aibek’s article 1 Awesome Gmail tip You Don’t Know about. Seriously.

How much time do you spend digging through spam and how do you fight it?

(By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

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Last year it sounded all so easy and routine when I said to myself “let’s move my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. Should be a piece of cake”.

Famous last words.

One year on and three attempts later, my blog is now finally on the Wordpress platform. I now feel like I need a long holiday.

Moving over to Wordpress involves a very steep learning curve and it was only in the past week or so that I realised how little I actually knew. So I figured a few posts about Wordpress features, widgets and plug-ins would be a good idea for anyone else contemplating the “Big Move”. For anyone who is contemplating it, I would say it is worth the effort involved but it’s good to get someone knowledgable to help you. When it is all done, you’ll see how far superior Wordpress is to Blogger in terms of features and control.

The Top Five Tools You Should Have On Your Wordpress Blog

I’ve tested some of the following features and others I have only glanced at. So don’t blame me if you try any of these out and they don’t work! Try them at your own risk!

To activate them, you need to unzip them and then place them in your “wp-content/plugins” folder by firing up a FTP program and moving things from your PC to your blog (FileZilla is an excellent choice). Often, there are written instructions inside the folder you must follow for it to work. Like everything else, this is all trial and error. If it doesn’t work, keep fiddling around with it until it does work.

Recent Comments – one of the things I like most about Wordpress is the ability to highlight recent comments on the front page. It’s only natural for readers to get a kick out of seeing their name on the page and this encourages them to come back and comment again. It’s also good for the blog owner to get a brief overview of any new comments that have come in.

Subscribe to Comments – this is a really cool feature which I have just implemented on my site. It allows people to subscribe to the comments in a post by having them emailed to them. Plus someone can subscribe to the comments without having to leave a comment first. Again, this is a good way to encourage repeat visitors.

Show Related Entries – this is one I have always wanted for my blog. This scans the post you have just read and offers links to similar posts that you have written. This is good for getting visitors to read and comment on your older work that may not be so visible anymore. A good way of recycling something you wrote ages ago.

Askimet – anyone who uses the internet for any lengthy period of time knows full well the spam problem. Bloggers have an even rougher time of it as blogs attract regular visitors and that is fertile hunting ground for the spammers. Askimet is a robust effective spam filtering tool that nukes the spam before it has a chance to hit your blog.

Redirection – this one was recommended to me by Aibek but unfortunately I can’t use it. Basically this plug-in allows you to re-direct posts if the URL changes or if someone types in the website name without the “www” (redirection will add the “www”). But I can’t use it because it needs “.htaccess” and it seems that Yahoo (my hosting company) doesn’t allow it! Which is a pity because this looks like a really great plug-in.

I am currently looking for a good Wordpress backup tool. If anyone can recommend one, please do let me know in the comments.

So those are my top five plug-ins so far. I’ll be back again tomorrow with my next batch of tools that you should look at for a Wordpress blog. As usual, please leave your comments and recommendations!

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Let’s say that your email address is ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’, basically everything sent to any of the following email addresses will be forwarded to your primary email.

And that’s not all, you can place as many dots as you want, it can be even something like ‘G.e.o.r.g.e.B.u.s.h@gmail.com’ and you’ll still get it on ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’

Additionally, I just also found out that you can embed random text to your email ID using ‘+’ sign. That is to say ‘GeorgeBush+anythingyouwant@gmail.com’ can be used as your email address, as well.

Ok I got it. Now what ?

1. One email for every purpose

Instead of using different email addresses for various purposes (work, school, friends, etc.) you can use different variations of your Gmail and filter incoming mails by ’sent to’ address. For instance, all incoming mail sent to ‘Name.Surname@gmail.com’ can be put to folder ‘work’, messages sent to ‘NameSurname@gmail.com’ can be put to ‘friends’, ‘N.ameSurname@gmail.com’ can be used for newsletters, and so on.

2. Track/Block spammers

When signing up for some website, say thatwebsite.com, you can add thatwebsite to your Gmail user ID (eg. GeorgeBush+thatwebsite@gmail.com). This way you can block your subscription whenever you want and even identify those websites that distribute your email address to spammers.

UPDATE:

Hello folks, here is another EXCELLENT find for Gmailers. Download Gmail Cheat Sheet to learn and master keyboard shortcuts. You might be surprised how much faster you can get with them. Plus most are pretty intuitive so you won’t need to memorize them. You can download printable one page long Gmail shortcut sheet from here.

More Tips? Surprise me in the comments.

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