Do You Have a ?Spam? Email Account? | AllClear ID
Jackie here.? Back before high powered spam filters I had two email accounts: one for daily use and a second to give out when I was worried about spam. I hated my inbox filling with solicitations for dating services and bodily enhancement pills, so I used this method to protect my real email address. It worked great for a while until I got tired of managing two separate accounts. Eventually, I stopped my spam email account and just stuck with one main email address.
Surprisingly I got a lot less spam than I expected. Turns out spam filters have come a long way in the past several years. The spammy messages that once filled my inbox now automatically found their way into a spam folder. I was amazed, and to be honest a little annoyed that I had maintained the separate accounts for so many years.
Spam & ID Theft
Avoiding spam can help you to avoid id theft. Spam messages often solicit your information and attempt to trick you in to giving away personal data that can be used to commit id theft. When you don?t see spam, you don?t have to worry about being tricked, even the best of us can be fooled by a clever email. Spam filters make checking email a lot less irritating, but they also play an important role in id theft prevention.
Spam Filters
Spam filters can differ from email provider to email provider. Some email hosts don?t have a spam filter, which can substantially increase the amount of spam you receive. How effective are the filters? A study released earlier this year by Cascade Insights indicates that spam filters can effectively reduce the amount of spam emails you receive.
The study reviewed three of the most popular filtered email options: Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo as well as one unfiltered email account. The email addresses used in the study were planted in places where spam might originate. After several weeks the email inboxes were evaluated to determine which spam filter was most effective.
Gmail and Hotmail were out front and very close (Hotmail slightly more effective than Gmail), with Yahoo coming in third. You can check out the full study here along with tips for avoiding spam. Shortly after this study was released, Google responded. They feel that the study results were not accurate and that their spam filter is actually the most effective on the market. Check out Gmail?s response to the study on the NY Times blog.
Which spam filter is the best? I don?t know, but what I do know is that using one can lower your id theft risk. Using two different email addresses used to be an effective way to avoid spam, but with modern spam filters, the extra effort might not be making a difference.
Do you use one email address or two? How do you avoid spam emails?
Source: https://www.allclearid.com/blog/do-you-have-a-%E2%80%9Cspam%E2%80%9D-email-account
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