Back in the day, when we were freely giving out our email address on all those websites, that eventually, they’d proliferate that address to all the scumbag emailers on earth. I’m blogging this. Seriously, friends. I hear a lot of griping from people that email sucks these days. Sure it does. A solution is to use a new email address for a while, and NOT use the one that you may have been used to from years and years of use. Those years and years of use have probably “dirtied” the address for a while.
Actually, Jesse is using a new address. I wonder if he’ll comment and let us know if it’s worked out for him. There are also solutions like www.mailblocks.com, a system that uses a challenge > response system. If someone emails you, it asks them to verify that they are human, your friend, etc. If it passes, then MailBlocks will send mail your way. If they don’t reply to the validation email from MailBlocks, and they aren’t on your pre-approved list, you won’t get the mail. It’s that simple. There are also email services like Google’s GMail, which is probably getting close to being released to the general public. That probably works very well against spam, if they do mail like they do searching (except for yesterday!).