Don’t fear the spam, contain it

By Mir
February 5, 2008
Category Quick Tips

Every so often I post a deal and someone comments “Oh, that place sends a ton of email! Beware!” It happened again this morning, in fact. Stores like to have your email address. Chances are that once you give it to them, they’re going to mail you all sorts of useless things, and they might even give your email address to their “partners.” (Partners in spammage, perhaps.)

This should not stop you from online shopping.

There are any number of free online mail services (I’m partial to Gmail, but you can use whatever you like) where you can make yourself a handy-dandy shopping address. Create an ID and use it only for online shopping. It keeps the annoying mail out of your regular account, and you know just where to go when you need to look up a receipt.

9 Comments

  1. I have been telling that same thing to people for years! You are very smart!!!!

  2. I have a yahoo account for this very reason. I also use it for listing stuff on craigslist, freecycle, etc. Any listserv that feels more like spam than information/entertainment.

  3. I’ve been doing this for years and it definitely helps keep spam out of our personal email account. I have several accounts for different reasons, and it always is a good thing to keep your personal emails separate from work, shopping, etc.

    Thanks for the reminder, Mir!

    jess

  4. Yep, me too. I’ve got my name account and the a junk for name account. It just makes it easy to remember. And whats great with gmail is you can designate what to have marked unread automatically. So that unlike the hotmail account I hardly ever use now, once a month if that, where I have over 1200 unread emails (which I’m sure is nothing) my gmail junk account only has like 50-100. Not bad at all.

  5. I’m with Not the mama, up there…I have my yahoo address and that’s the one I use for 90% of “internet”…then I have my other one….and that’s the private one that is used for REAL email….

  6. But what if I want the emails to go to DIFFERENT accounts? I don’t want to set up several different addresses then have everything end up at myaddress@gmail.com. That kind of blows the whole point, doesn’t it?

    Ah well, throw a computer in front of me and my IQ drops 50 points . . .

  7. @Brigitte
    Do what makes you feel good.

    Either your a lumper or a splitter. If you are a lumper, you don’t like to have to check multiple accounts and would rather use filters to file stuff into folders (or tags if you are using Gmail) and then just check the folder every so often. No logging out of one and logging into the other account and remembering passwords, etc…. It’s all in one spot (lumped together). You set up a filter that says every time an email containing “+anything” shows up, skip the inbox and put it in the “Anything” folder. Replace “anything” with “Shopping” and there you have all your shopping things in one place, but not in your inbox.

  8. Thank you Ann. I never knew about the + thing with gmail. So very convenient. I’ll be changing my email address with several people now so I can automatically filter all the junk. Also, there is an option with gmail where you can tell it to reply with the same address as it was mailed too (that way you can just reply from one of your “junk” addresses and not worry they are gettign your real one back).
    Beth

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