Dead Rooster’s Guide to Stopping SPAM for Free
This morning I was practically frothing-at-the-mouth with excitement to write a useful article illustrating the dangers of using certain accelerants—such as gunpowder—to ignite stubborn charcoal briquettes in backyard barbecue grills, when I opened my email program and discovered this:
You may think I used some kind of Photoshop trickery to falsely inflate the size of my spam folder, but I SWEAR the number is accurate.
Most of us think of spammers as scum and would not think it unreasonable to push one off the observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Center. I often wonder how these miscreants function in society. For example, let’s say you’re hosting a neighborhood barbecue and someone you know has invited a friend who happens to be a spammer:
Spammer: Hello, my name is Hitler Spamalot. Nice to meet you. This is my wife Trixie and our daughter Viagra.
Flames dance on the air in front of his lips as he speaks.
You: Um… hello. So, Hitler, what do you do for work?
Hitler: I’m a spammer. In fact, I sent out over one-billion messages just this morning.
You: Wow!… over one-billion… that’s a lot…
Hitler: …and those were just the one’s I sent to Andy Rooney!
You forcibly cram an apple in Hitler’s mouth and throw him head-first into the raging barbecue pit. Your guests clink beer bottles and toast your resourcefulness. Trixie and Viagra thank you then happily walk away arm-in-arm into the red sunset.
The Truth About Stopping SPAM
If you’re anything like me, you’d rather have both eyeballs sucked out with toilet plungers than have to look at another SPAM email. But, what can you do? You can’t just toss every spammer you meet, one by one, into the swirling, white-hot embers of a perfectly stoked barbecue pit—it would take too long.
The unfortunate truth is that, once you start receiving SPAM emails, it is nearly impossible to stop them. Whatever you do, never, under any circumstances, respond to a SPAM email, even to “unsubscribe.” This is a trap to find out if your email address is valid. Once they know you’re there, you’re toast. They’ll sell your email address to other spamming creatures of the underworld and things will get worse.
Where Do All These SPAM Emails Come From?
I don’t know the identity of the evil organization responsible for most of these emails, but it makes other evil organizations such as the World Coalition of Mean Dentists and the Texas Republican Party look like kitten groomers.
A lot of the time, it’s individual entrepreneurs in third-world countries thinking they are going to get rich by selling 55-gallon drumloads of prescription-only pharmaceuticals to people that are smart enough to open an email client but dumb enough to believe they are legit. The reason they’ve got YOUR email address is usually one of the following:
*Your email address is available in plain sight somewhere online
*You forward jokes to your friends who also forward them but without removing your address
*You registered for a forum and they sold your address to a spammer
*You used email verification to download something and they sold your address
Preventing SPAM From Entering Your Email Box in the First Place
The good news is that all those SPAM emails in my spam folder will continue only for a couple more days, then it will completely stop. Why? Because they are all attacking my temporary email account. An account I have set to shut off after only one week of use. And, you can do the same. Here’s how:
From now on, any time you need to give your email address for verification, downloading, joining a forum, etc., go to spambox.us and register for a temporary address.
They will issue you an email address with an expiration time of your choosing, anywhere from 30 minutes to 1-year, that will forward all emails to your real email address. Then, after the expiration period, you will never receive another message.
The beauty of this is that it goes to your actual email address and no matter what nasty fiend they forward the temporary address to, you will never receive any junk after it expires. Haha! 
Enjoy!
Some have asked where that spam folder comes from—what program am I using. Well, that’s an anti-spam program called Cloudmark Desktop which only works with Firefox or Microsoft’s Outlook and Outlook express. You can try it free for 15 days:
Dead Rooster is the online home of 
Ah, the spam MUST be knee-deep right now because I was so irked with it, I ended up writing about BLOG spam this morning. I haven’t seen how much spam I’m getting through my regular email accounts, thankfully. But your technique for getting rid of it makes a lot of sense.
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William McCamment
reply on July 22nd, 2009 1:22 pm:
Spam is in the air… can’t you smell it? LOL
I get so much blog spam it isn’t even funny, but usually Akismet gets rid of it for me before I even see it. So far, it’s stopped 8,528 comment spams. For Free!
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I had never heard of SpamBox before so this was interesting to learn about. I went over there to try it out and it’s a pretty easy solution. I was using Mailinator before, which is similar but the expiration date is always 1 week I think.
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William McCamment
reply on July 23rd, 2009 5:02 pm:
Glad I could help! The REAL key to stopping spam is to never start getting it in the first place! LOL
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I’m just starting to get comment spam which is bittersweet because I am loath to delete any comments I get.
You and Jenn are much more popular than I am. Dude, you have 411 Feedburner subscribers, over 6,000 Twitter followers and what the heck is feedcat.net? (I need to check that out.) My point is that you are going to get some spam due to your high profile.
Up until now, spam email was the only thing that made me feel wanted. But I just got a Blackberry and the red flashing crap alert is starting to annoy me. And it doesn’t separate my junk mail. I hate the Blackberry but I got a great deal on it. That sounds like a Woody Allen joke. “I hate the food here.” “Yes and they have such small portions.”
I’d better check out this site pronto. And thanks for the tip on Friendfeed. It has really improved my Feedburner numbers.
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William McCamment
reply on July 23rd, 2009 5:08 pm:
I hate deleting spam comments too. I still check the Akismet folder to make sure it is indeed spam, but I’ve learned that Akismet is always right. If it says it’s spam, it’s spam.
It has caught well over 8,000 spam comments for me. It’s amazing (by the way, I don’t know if they have a version for blogger or not).
Don’t worry about Feedcat. I get no traffic from it and I have my doubts that anyone on the other end ever reads my stuff either. It usually has a big number on it, but, actual readers? Probably zero. LOL
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Excellent! I will be trying this out quickly. I don’t receive a moderate amount of spam, but I want to do anything to curb even that and perhaps shut out more in the future.
Danke…
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William McCamment
reply on July 23rd, 2009 5:11 pm:
If you’re not getting much spam, I would only use it for signups on sketchy forums or downloading ebooks, etc.
It sure is great, though, to have a big surge of SPAM and, two days later, have it stop dead.
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Speak for yourself about feedcat. I would be so psyched to have a big number on there. So I ran over and signed up. I’ve got 1 reader and it’s the only counter that I have on my site. It’s so pathetic, it’s almost cute. How long did it take you to get that huge # on there?
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William McCamment
reply on July 23rd, 2009 8:20 pm:
In 3 days I had over 1,000 followers. I’m guessing you will too. Right now mine says 5,187 but you watch, tomorrow it will be like 2,000 or something. It kind of jumps around a lot.
Seriously though, I don’t think ANYONE is reading my posts on FeedCat. I could be wrong, I guess.
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Brilliant writing
You’re back now
thanks
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William McCamment
reply on July 24th, 2009 7:03 pm:
Thanks John!
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You’re always looking out for us, aren’t you? This tool and Blog Engage and FriendFeed. I can’t wait to see what you have up your sleeve next. Also what kind of kickbacks are you receiving from these companies? Any way I can get in on them?
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William McCamment
reply on July 26th, 2009 5:22 pm:
The first rule of Fight Club is, “Don’t talk about Fight Club.” Hehe.
Actually, I’m not getting any kickbacks, but, as you know, I’ve recently came back from a long dirt-nap and have to resurrect the blog.
I am getting great search engine traffic for these posts and the search engines are starting to warm up to me again. Gotta build up some juice so I can focus solely on my humor writing (which is all I REALLY want to do).
Not to mention, I think these posts really do help people.
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Holy crap that’s a lot of spam! I guess after reading this I can consider myself lucky as I don’t get even close to that much spam.
P.S. Thanks for adding the blogengage image and supporting the community!
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William McCamment
reply on July 27th, 2009 9:53 am:
As I mentioned in the post, it will disappear. In fact, as I write this, it’s already gone, never to be seen again.
You’re welcome! I love BlogEngage!
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