[jambutty]

When registering for an ISP most people will select a user name that is their own name and they end up with an email address like [email protected] If their own name is not available then it will end up as name1 or 15 or 45. The same applies when registering for a web mail address.

So once a spammer knows the email address domain name - that is isp.co.uk - all he has to do is put any real name at the beginning and that person will get the spam. Of course there will be some spam emails that don’t hit on a person’s email account but that won’t bother the spammer because it won’t be returned to the spammer but end up with someone else. I get plenty of emails returned to me that I didn’t send.

The way to defeat that method of spamming is to select a username that is not a real name but a selection of random lower case alphabet characters with maybe a number thrown in. Now lets see the spammer guess that. With a user name made up of 9 random characters the possible combinations would be over 100,000,000,000,000. As PC’s get faster and better it is only a matter of time before someone produces a programme that will take into account random characters but until then I enjoy a spam free life except for those where someone has sold on my email address. But there aren’t many of them. Barely one a day.

However you can reduce the likelihood of receiving spam still further. Most if not all ISP’s will allow you to have up to 5 email addresses and with web mail you can have as many as you want. I have one random character email address just for on-line payment processors and on-line banking. I have another for friends and family and a third for when I join various sites and forums. This last one is the most likely to be sold on by admins but I can delete that email account and replace it with another with my ISP when it starts to attract lots of spam.

You can arrange your email client (Outlook Express) to filter the emails to their respective folders with the general purpose (the third one) going to my In Box.

Whilst you are in the mood for random characters, you do have random characters of upper and lower case alphabet and numbers as you password, don’t you? In fact some sites also have a secret question and answer for when you want to recover your password. The answer does not have to be a truthful answer. Random characters will do here as well. In fact some sites give you the option of posing your own question. I use random characters for the question too.

But people are lazy and use real words for passwords and often use the same one over and over. That’s just asking to have an account somewhere being got at.

For me random characters rule.