How to Avoid Spam (Part 8 of 10) - Change your email address

Change your email address
If your email address is discovered by spammers, there's realistically only one thing you can do: change it. This is inconvenient, you have to send an updated email address to all your friends, change all the places you use it on the Internet, but think how many times you've changed your cell phone number. You haven't lost any friends over that, have you? That issue has been fixed for cell phones with local number portability, but still there's less expectation of permanence with email addresses and cell phone numbers. Changing your email address will help you avoid spam, at least until the spammers get hold of your new email address.

You can use the old address as your disposable address, just checking occasionally, if at all, for legitimate messages. Or, you can cut all ties with that address by canceling it, that way anyone who tries to email your old address will get an error message and know that it's not good anymore. Don't expect spammers to bother to remove your old email address from their lists, though. I deleted my drew@hevle.com account and four months later, I reactivated it for a couple of days, and was getting even more spam than before.

Follow the advice in Part 4 of this article, choose a new email address that is easy for you and your friends to remember, but would be hard for a spammer to guess. And, most importantly, don't give spammers your new email address or sign up for mail you don't want.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 9 of How to Avoid Spam.

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