Finally, a topic I can speak more authoritatively about.
Some thoughts on reducing the amount of spam you get:
- Use Gmail. Seriously, their spam filtering is the gold standard, especially after their acquisition of Postini, and screwups/misclassifications are very rare. (This is a strange recommendation from me, given my thoughts about Google in general, but for the average person, it will be almost impossible to beat their spam filtering out of the box). Any of the big three free email providers will do (Google, MSN/Hotmail/Outlook, Yahoo), but Google's in a whole different league. (I can talk for days about MSN and Yahoo problems.)
- Relatedly, Fastmail is great if you're willing to pay for your email. Personally, I feel like you should be willing to pay for your email if it's important to you. Unless you absolutely know what you're doing (and no, "I did a devops once" is not sufficient), do not run your own email system on the public Internet. (Yes, there are plenty of things you can do as a one-person mail system operator that you can't do for a large userbase, but this whole space is a huge minefield that will punish you by disappearing your email if you get it wrong.)
- I'm sure this disagrees with the video posted above (sorry, I didn't watch it, aintnobodygottimeforthat.gif), but: don't spend a ton of time customizing settings and tweaking things. Your email provider's defaults are going to be pretty good out of the box, and well-suited to a broad variety of people and mailing habits. Filtering out individual senders who are giving you a particularly hard time, sure, but don't go crazy with the custom settings, because a year from now you won't remember any of the things you changed, and getting things back to normal will be painful.
- Give a bogus address on sites that ask for/require them, if you don't strictly need to hear from them. postmaster@<their domain> is personal favorite. You'd be amazed how many sites will let you see the cool thing you wanted to see without verifying the email address they ask for. This is good advice about your personal information in general.
- If your provider supports it, you can use "plussed addresses" of the form yourusername+somespecialtag@<your domain> to give a unique address to each site you give an email address to (emails to those addresses will just go into your regular mailbox). Gmail and fastmail support this, no clue about other providers. This gives you an easy way to both see who's spreading your information around, and a good way to filter it.
- Never donate to a political campaign (or at least, don't provide an email address). I'm...really feeling this one in 2018.
- Don't use Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. as a way of logging into random websites. This is likely to be controversial with security folks (who will rightly point out that the security posture of Google et al. is dramatically better than that of randowebsite.com), but these sorts of integrations can often leak a large amount of information about you to the sites that you're logging into. Corollary to this, however, is to use a password manager and unique usernames/passwords on every website you log into. You should do this anyway. Use a password manger. Have I mentioned that password managers are good?
- Related to the above, "private browsing" with a good ad-blocker (ublock origin is a favorite) and privacy extension (like Privacy Badger) by default is a pretty great way to reduce the amount of tracking you're subjected to (and thus, the amount of identity aggregation that happens where you can't see it). Combined with a password manager that auto-fills your username and password (or using a browser extension like Firefox's Multi-Account Containers and their facebook container to keep things separate), it can work pretty well.
That's just a stream of consciousness off the top of my head. I'm pretty far into the weeds as far as privacy management goes, so I try not to advocate for "what works for me"; I accept that I'm weird.
And if you've noticed there's a little crossover between spam and privacy/personal security, it's because they're really intertwined these days thanks to an industry built around creating profiles of you based on the tiniest snippets of data.
Also, use a password manager.
Bitwarden,
LastPass,
1Password, doesn't matter, just find one you like and use it. Use a password manager. Please. Use one.
It's funny because GMail recently had privacy issues.
In the world we live in today it's important to have a voice and say what is wrong with the decor and build a better world.
Twitter is a vehicle for many. Text Messengers another. Even some news channels and newspapers have journalists that are very important to learn from. Without ethical journalism this world would fall into anarchy. It's important to have private and secure ways of communication.
Our email addresses are private, family circles, friends we trust and love.
The most popular browser, I believe, is Google Chrome. It has the most solid reputation, even without being perfect.
We have to stop China and Russia from spamming our lives.
Even Saudi Arabia is expanding his base of the best expert hackers in the world; they are really into it.
Spammers, hackers, junkyard dealers, ...they all want to infiltrate everyone's email addresses and get your private info.
The USA have some of the top world experts spies and hackers. They are so discrete you can smell them across the borderline.
They'll put junk in your online email and wish you click on the winning prises, so they can get access to your bank accounts and economic affiliations.
But China is the world capital of hackers and junk. Block China and you'll breathe cleaner air. ...In all aspects of mental and physical health.
It's your email address we're talking about here, and your phone line and cellular transmission. All of them get junk mail.
Thank you in your own words...positive outlook.
