Emails, Spam, and Facebook.

[Pilgrim]

I have a large number of email addresses, 14 that I can think of. 11 of them I use through Mailwasher Pro.
To prevent having emails that I want finishing up in spam folders on the email providers servers I have all spam filters, including the one in Mailwasher, turned off.
From the beginning I have never received a great deal of spam and if I do get any I simply add it to the blacklist in Mailwasher.

I am not a fan of social networking sites nor do I have any interest in using them but over the last year a lot of software developers and bloggers have increasingly got into the habit of only offering their giveaways on Facebook or similar sites, to start with I simply let them go but a few months ago a program that I particular wanted was offered in that way on Facebook.

After thinking about it carefully and reading a number of posts on Facebook security I decided to open an account while taking great care to do two things, when I opened the account I went through all the settings I could find listed and nailed them down as tight as I could, before I opened the account I created a new email address that has only been used for that one purpose.

That new email address has received more spam in the last few months than all of the others put together have in five years!
The question that has been in my mind from the beginning is that unless that email address has been leaked/given out by Facebook why should that be so, because I cannot think of an answer, it is with the same provider as five of my other addresses and none of them have ever had that problem.

I never had a very high view of Facebook in the first place, now it is even lower.

[JayCub]

Im not a fan of FB myself other than i can chat with friends, jumping through hoops for software is not my idea of fun, but at the end of the day it's about marketing and money, you get nothing for nothing as the saying goes, although true in many cases i witnessed different.

Trying hard not to be biased Raymond gives free advice on the blog, which gave me a chance to join the forum, so sometimes free is free.

Getting back to the point of e-mails the decision to have a dedicated e-mail for FB was a very smart move and i have dedicated e-mails for some sites, on one e-mail i have two sites on and no spam ever.

I can't see Google + been any better than FB as they will use this to target you with specific user advertisements, a friend of mine just finished a course and showed me how easily it was to target specific group by age sex and interests. very creepy side of the internet, big brother was not this intense.

This just goes to show it is more than malware, trojans and virus to be careful of.

[Pilgrim]

how easily it was to target specific group by age sex and interests.

For the first I put the earlest I can find, the last site I registered on did not go back before 1920.

For the second they are too late.

And for the third I don't have any.

Doesn't look like I would be a very good customer.

[JayCub]

Well i can say i will bore them to death, and although the sites i visit are repetitive for the most part and many of the hardware sites the prices are out of my league, this will be another customer they lose.. even when i take time to watch the TV the adds are muted and the kettle goes on, all i need now is a dog that hates junk mail as much as i do.. reminds me of futurama when they stepped into cyberspace and where attacked by advertisements.

i think it really comes down to a trade off and how much your willing to give-away to take advantage of the offer, although i think first name only as some go for full name and telephone city and town as far as im concerned i fill in the blanks nowhere near where i am as my ISP is in another county.

[Pilgrim]

I think it really comes down to a trade off and how much your willing to give-away to take advantage of the offer, although i think first name only as some go for full name and telephone city and town as far as im concerned i fill in the blanks nowhere near where i am as my ISP is in another county.

I used to do a lot of writing, none of it under my own name, as for addresses I think I have them in at least one major city on several continents, ISP's I have from all over the world thanks to VPN's and proxies, email addresses on three continents. Phone numbers are slightly different, on two or three occasions I have made them up and they have been rejected so I have just looked up the phone number of the library nearest to the address I have used, never failed yet.

The whole point though is that sites like Facebook have a responsibility to their users which they simply ignore, as I said in my first post the email address in question has only ever been used on their site and as I started receiving spam within a couple of days of registering the only place I can see that the spammers could have got it from is Facebook.

The WWW was intended for everyone and while that is still true up to a point it seems that it is being increasingly taken over by a relatively small number of organisations whose main interest at the end of the day is not providing a service but making a profit and where that is concerned no matter how much they make it is never enough for them.

There are a great many problems in this world that will never change until people are valued more highly than money and that will never happen because the majority of those in a position to do anything about it have a vested interest in keeping things going the way they are.