I want to reaffirm my belief that Spam Motel is an Awesome service! This is a service that really lets you take control of your email address, blocking all spam. Now, it won’t do anything for existing spam you are already getting. In other words, if your email address is already on a bunch of bulk email lists out there, Spam Motel won’t help at all. But for any future email address communications (giving out your email address), you will be in complete control.
What it does is let you make a new email address for every service or website that requires an email address. All email going to that address (an @spammotel.com address) will be forwarded to your real email address. The beauty of it is that you can also attach information to that address, like “this is from classmates.com”. Then when you have 50 or so @spammotel.com addresses on your account, and you get emails forwarded to your real address, you will ALWAYS know who originally was given each address.
So, when some evil website sells your address, you will know exactly who did it, and then you can go delete that address and flame the heck out of them. You also have the option of putting a filter on that address (it works best if you do it in your email client) so that you will never get email through that address unless it comes from the original source.
Once again, I LOVE this service! Its completely free, and it has many cool tools. One is a little client that you can run within Windows to create a new address. Another cool feature is your web based account manager that lets you see all your email addresses (the @spammotel.com ones), and see stats for each one. You can add/remove addresses at will from within your account manager.
This service is still a little buggy, but it has no problems that you can’t work around pretty easily. I have sent emails to the owner numerous times, and received a response within 2 or 3 days.
So, you no longer have to use the “this is my spam email address” approach anymore. Because that approach works, but you really have no control over that ‘spam’ address. Once it gets out, into evil spammer’s hands, the game is over. You will always be wading through spam, unless you get a spammotel.com account.
