|
by: Balraj Dhaliwal
Everybody hates spam! I am sure spammers hate getting spam too, but they still continue to dish it
out. Why? Because it is still effective. Believe it or not, many of us still click on the links or
follow-up with the spam message. As long as we continue to do this, spam will exist. If everybody
understood this and paid no attention to spam, the spammers will eventually give up because it
costs them realy money to send out emails. It is hard to quantify what the cost of sending out one,
two or fifty emails is, but 1 million or 5 million emails certainly has a cost that is not
negligible. When the payback starts to get so small that the spammers cannot make a decent living,
they will find something else to do. This day will come and I cannot wait for it to arrive.
In the meantime, what can we do about it. Well, I am not going to tell you that there is a perfect
solution that will stop all spam, but what I will tell you is that there is a way to reduce the
problem and manage it effectively using the 7 steps outlined below.
Step #1: Get Your Own Domain Name
Fighting spam effectively starts with getting your own domain name. For example if your name is
Andy Williams, you would purchase a domain name called andywilliams.com, which is of course already
owned by the famous singer. This has some unique advantages over using an ISP given domain name or
a webmail service such as Hotmail or Gmail. It also has some minor disadvantages. Let's examine
these.
One major advantage is that you control the entire email address. You could create emails addresses
like andy@andywilliams.com, info@andywilliams.com, sales@andywilliams.com and so on. This is in
stark contract to an ISP assigned name like andywilliams@comcast.net. If you wanted another one,
you'd have to open up another account or pay extra for each additional ISP assigned address. If you
ever decided to switch ISP's, you would lose that email address and have to start over using a new
one, and inform everyone you communicated with about it - a very messy proposition.
Many get around this problem by getting a Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail account which you can access
from anywhere as long as you have internet access. These types of email accounts definitely have a
place in your email toolchest, but do not suffice as your primary personal email address. One
reason is that you do not have access to your email messages and address books when you are not
online, like during a long flight. Anotehr drawback is that they do not allow you to export the
online address books making portability very tedious.
I prefer owning my own domain name which I call my permanent email address. I will always have this
email address as long as I renew this domain name every year. The cost of registering a domain name
varies from $4 to $8 per year for most common ones. This is a small price to pay for the advantages
it brings you.
The one minor disadvantage of owning your own domain name is that you need to manage it yourself,
or have someone do it for you. This in my opinion is far outweighed by the advantages mentioned
above.
|
