I feel this guy's pain!

December 26, 2006 (Computerworld) On Jan. 24, 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates famously announced that by 2006, "spam will be solved." He was right. As I write this, 2006 is almost over and I've solved my spam problem. (Gates is still working on his.)

Everyone has spam issues, but I’m sure I have more than most. I'm constantly on the road and use my phone for e-mail, which means I can’t always use PC-based antispam software. Other antispam tools also aren't useful to me because, as a writer who covers technology, I need to be reachable via e-mail by readers, public relations people and others. I can't just create a whitelist and block everyone else, nor can I afford to change my e-mail address every year. Half the e-mail I get comes from people I don't know.

Then there's the issue of sheer quantity. In the past 10 years I've published newsletters, edited magazines and written articles. As a result, my e-mail address is published online on hundreds, maybe thousands, of Web pages. I must be on every spammer list ever created.

Until a few weeks ago, I dealt with spam by maintaining a complex combination of permanent and temporary e-mail addresses, Outlook rules, antispam software and funky kludges, such as masking my e-mail address by displaying it online as an image rather than as machine-readable text. My complicated system helped -- but certainly didn't solve -- my spam problem. I still got lots of spam in my in-box, and about 5% of the messages in my spam folders weren't, in fact, spam, which meant I still had to sift through all that junk mail.

A few weeks ago, though, I bought a BlackBerry Pearl, which forced me to finally solve my spam problem.

As a matter of course I change my email address once a year. It takes about that long for Spammers to take control of my mailbox, and I have tried a number of solutions to resolve the problem.. Few have worked well for long... His system makes a lot of sense, and I will be giving it a try. It is a rather lengthy article, read the whole thing.

Originally published to my business blog

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