Eighteen Months Without Spam

It’s been approximately eighteen months since I started avoiding spam. In that time, I’ve received only a handful of spam, all of it going to one of my spam email aliases. Here’s how I did it:

• I changed my personal email address to xxx@unraveled.com.
• I deleted my previous personal email address. (Yes, this means that anyone who had this email address would not be able to email me anymore unless they contacted me through other means. Using the Web, these other means are currently easy to find.)
• I created two new email aliases, yyy@unraveled.com and zzz@spammotel.com. (Spam Motel is an excellent service that forwards and manages email from your Spam Motel email alias to your personal email address.)
• I changed all of my active web accounts (Amazon, eBay, Buy.com) to use yyy@unraveled.com. I only gave yyy@unraveled.com to online retailers that I trusted would not share my email address with anyone. If I thought there was any chance that they would share my email address, I gave them yyy@unraveled.com or zzz@spammotel.com.
• When I wanted to include my email alias on any web page, I encoded it using the Hivelogic Enkoder so it would be protected from email-harvesting robots. (A big applause to Dan Benjamin for creating the Enkoder.)
• If I absolutely had to expose my email address on the Web, I used zzz@spammotel.com. (This has only happened once. On principle, I avoid services that require me to expose my email alias because I know it’s not necessary.)
• I only gave xxx@unraveled.com to people I trusted would not share my email address with anyone. If I thought there was any chance that they would share my email address, I gave them yyy@unraveled.com or zzz@spammotel.com.
• The idea behind yyy@unraveled.com and zzz@spammotel.com is that they are simply aliases for my personal email address. If I ever begin receiving a large amount of spam through these aliases, they can be changed without cutting off my contacts. (True personal contacts should have xxx@unraveled.com.)

That’s basically it. It might sound complicated, but after you follow it for a few months, it becomes second nature. If you do everything correctly, only your email aliases should ever receive spam, and your primary email alias should receive very little if encoded properly. Your personal email address — the one you give to people — should never receive spam. Of course, if a person gives your email address to spammers, this won’t do anything to stop spam. Then again, if you actually know anyone who who might give your email address to spammers, you may want to reconsider your friendship.

So where did the handful of spams come from? As far as I understand, the only possibility is that they came from spammers who physically browsed to unraveled and copied my email alias by hand. Nearly all spammers gather emails using email-harvesting robots. Apparently, some spammers still do it old school style.

Overall, this method has worked extremely well for me, but it does have a few drawbacks, namely that you have to manage which email your contacts have over time. For example, if you give your email alias to someone and they turn out to be someone who you want to stay in contact with, you have to make it a point to give them your personal email address. If you don’t, there’s a chance you may lose contact with them when you change your alias. Personally, I haven’t run into this because I haven’t had to change my alias yet, but your mileage may vary.

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