|
FastMail Forum All posts relating to FastMail.FM should go here: suggestions, comments, requests for help, complaints, technical issues etc. |
|
Thread Tools |
28 Aug 2021, 07:51 AM | #1 |
Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 54
|
Pobox and managing spam?
Hello. My Pobox account due for renewal soon. I'm on the fence. Please give advice?
I like my username very much. But I don't use the account. Largely because it receives tons of spam. Hundreds of messages. On a daily basis. My concern is that someday I'll try and make use of the account only to find that the spamwork is so daunting that there's no good reason for me to have paid for renewals year after year. Do you readers have tips? Would an email client (rather than Web-based account settings) be useful, do you think? Thanks! |
28 Aug 2021, 10:37 AM | #2 |
Essential Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: UK
Posts: 270
|
You are plagued by spam and ask for advice.
I will pass on the advice I read in this forum some years ago and followed: Buy your own domain name and use a different address on that domain for each purpose. I did that and am very glad I did. Nowadays I get maybe one piece of spam a week. (Re e-mail clients - personally I have never seen the point of them - I can think of nothing an individual might reasonably want to do with e-mail that can't be done using Fastmail's web interface.) Last edited by Grhm : 28 Aug 2021 at 10:48 AM. Reason: Adding remark re e-mail client v web mail |
28 Aug 2021, 04:37 PM | #3 | |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Manchester UK
Posts: 2,616
|
Quote:
Sometimes I like to copy e-mails between accounts, and although Gmail is basically my junk account, there are occasional e-mails I want to copy over. It's much easier doing that in Thunderbird. Added to that, Thunderbird also shows my calendars - another bonus. |
|
28 Aug 2021, 05:00 PM | #4 |
Essential Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: UK
Posts: 270
|
|
28 Aug 2021, 05:06 PM | #5 |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Manchester UK
Posts: 2,616
|
It is for me!
Blue calendar = advisory only Red calendar = stuff that requires me to do something. Magenta calendar = my work related calendar, to keep track of colleagues forthcoming holidays, etc. |
28 Aug 2021, 05:08 PM | #6 | |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: The Netherlands
Posts: 2,908
|
Quote:
Last edited by Berenburger : 28 Aug 2021 at 05:15 PM. |
|
28 Aug 2021, 05:17 PM | #7 | |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Manchester UK
Posts: 2,616
|
Quote:
I assume it's because of people being free and easy - giving out their e-mail address anywhere and everywhere is sure to attract the spammers. Or are they just unlucky? |
|
28 Aug 2021, 06:07 PM | #8 |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,095
|
This is actually one of the few genuine advantages of local email clients. Because you can see the Fastmail and other account as simply separate folder trees, to selectively copy or move individual or sets of messages between accounts is, indeed, very easy and intuitive.
|
28 Aug 2021, 07:03 PM | #9 | |
Essential Contributor
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: Scotland
Posts: 492
|
Quote:
The email client I used to use had some facilities that I miss, eg - the ability to process mails loaded from a file, on a one-off or scheduled basis. These could be emails exported from other mail clients, or emails generated as notifications by other software but not sent outside the machine, or (as I did for ages when getting used to that client) emails fetched by another client but duplicated during that fetch and fed into the second client as well - the ability to edit any part of an incoming mail's content. I most often used that to change misleading subject headers to something meaningful to me, and to edit the references headers to separate from a parent mail a sub-thread that I wished to keep separate. - the ability of a filter to write selected mails to a single external file (one after the other) or an external folder (as separate files) which meant those mails could be processed by external programs then reloaded using the first feature. One could eg use that to strip most of the headers off mails being archived, as although disk space is cheap etc halfing the size of an archive still helps speed things up, notably backing up the archives and searching them. |
|
31 Aug 2021, 12:03 AM | #10 |
Master of the @
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Tel-Aviv, ISRAEL
Posts: 1,666
|
|
31 Aug 2021, 12:15 AM | #11 |
Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 54
|
Thank you, everyone, for these comments!
My username is short and common. Along the lines of 'bob@' and 'john@ and 'oded@'. I don't use the email address much but ever since I snagged it I've seen tons of spam. [I suspect someone who held the username before I took it used the account heavily?] I've been keeping the username (renewing the account) as an 'insurance policy' -- in case, one day, my main (non-Pobox) username/account/service goes under. |
31 Aug 2021, 12:28 AM | #12 |
Master of the @
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Tel-Aviv, ISRAEL
Posts: 1,666
|
|
31 Aug 2021, 01:57 AM | #13 |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,095
|
If the spam seems random, rather than something relevant to your own online activity, the short, common email address is probably the reason for the large volume. Many spammers try sending to common names at each domain, expecting a high proportion of them to hit active accounts.
|
31 Aug 2021, 03:39 PM | #14 |
Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2021
Posts: 1
|
Having the same doubt here. Been a user for almost 20 years. I'm not really sure if it's worthy anymore these days.
|
2 Sep 2021, 06:17 AM | #15 |
Master of the @
Join Date: Feb 2017
Location: USA
Posts: 1,749
|
I have used POBox.com in the past and generally liked it a lot. Unusual amounts of spam are probably not related to POBox but instead to your very common user name, as you have heard from others. On the other hand, here is a question for you: does the spam end up in the spam folder, and therefore is it a problem? Having used a Gmail address for now about 15 years I get some spam but Gmail conveniently puts it in the spam folder, which I quickly check once in awhile for the odd false positive that ends up there too.
|