Seems straightforward enough; I do these things and more to protect myself, and have been doing so for years. For example, I have multiple email addresses, each one intended for a specific purpose. I never give my business email addresses for any purpose other than business, so only people directly involved with me in a business manner have access to those addresses. I use unique email addresses for things like online accounts with PayPal, Amazon, eBay, and so-on. I use a unique email address for personal causes, like signing petitions or posting comments online. I compartmentalize my emails even further, but I won\u2019t get into the detail here. You get the point.<\/p>\n

Now if that sounds like overkill, perhaps it is. But I have a rock-solid system that allows me to determine where my spam is coming from. If I sign up for a new service and see a dramatic increase in spam within hours, I know exactly where the breach in trust occurred. It happens all the time, and I know exactly what services are causing spam headaches.<\/p>\n

For example, I routinely sign online petitions for causes that I believe in. I won\u2019t mention the name of the petition site, but whenever I signed a petition, my spam spiked like a Mexican jumping bean within minutes of signing said petition. Now, I wasn\u2019t paying attention, because some of the petition sites have a checkbox \u2013 checked on by default \u2013 that asks if you want to include your signature on the site\u2019s page. Perhaps I had one glass of wine too many, but I didn\u2019t see it or chose to ignore it, and voila! Spam flood. And that\u2019s not even including the flood of spam messages from the petition site itself. Support one cause and you start getting messages from people you\u2019ve never heard of, asking you to support another cause. It\u2019s pretty alarming, actually, because being hounded by these people has the opposite effect (for me, anyway). I\u2019m so peeved by the \u2018Mormon knocking on my door\u2019 effect that I want to actively not<\/em> support their cause.<\/p>\n

I even recently had to shutter one of my email accounts because it had become infested with so much spam that it became useless to me as a practical email address. It\u2019s never a fun thing when you have to shut down an address and ensure that everyone you want to maintain has access to your new address. And it made me wonder: am I responsible for my own misery? I admit that I\u2019d gotten sloppy with who got what email address, and it\u2019s clear that even one misstep can have disastrous results, if you consider spam to be disastrous.<\/p>\n

Jeff Fox recounts a similar story. His email got into the wild in a single tweet by one of his Twitter friends. That error turned into 8,000 spam messages. So what\u2019s the moral of the story? We must be vigilant. The spam landscape is bad enough without making it easier for spammers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spam, spam, spam. It\u2019s fast and furious, appearing more quickly than you can nuke it. It\u2019s a virtual game of Whack-a-Mole, and the game\u2019s rigged,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[11,9,10,8,7],"class_list":["post-879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","category-spam","tag-allspammedup","tag-bot","tag-botnet","tag-malware","tag-spam","jsn-master"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1670,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions\/1670"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}