As a follow up to my GMail laments, I wanted to share a very simple spam-fighting trick with the world. See, I have two email addresses. Whooptee-do, you say — you’ve got a gadzillon of them. Well, the trick is that one of them is white list-only. That is, only those emails and mail hosts that I explicitly approved of end up in the inbox. The rest are trashed as junk. This is my “well-established contact” email address. The other email address is my “first-contact” address. That’s the email address you will see me using most frequently in public communications, blog comments, presentations, etc. You guessed it, this is my GMail address.
Because Google takes such good care of us customers, and works its magic filtering emails, I only have to do a little bit more clean-up work in that inbox. However, I still need to do that work, and this account would still be bothersome for message-a-second work communication. So, I use two. Once the first contact is established, I add the addressee to my white list on the second account and use GMail’s capability to send from more than email address to switch the conversation to the white list-only account. Ok, it doesn’t always work perfectly, but it’s much better than trudging through the junk-littered inbox most of your working hours.
Do you have any other ideas? Maybe an improvement on my simplistic trick? Do share.