A few months ago, I gave up the Mindspring account that I had been using since 1996, along with the accompanying email address. It was partially an economic decision, since my wife and I both had our own Internet access accounts (hers is with AOL) and it really didn’t make sense to have two. The straw that broke the camel’s back, though, was the fact that I was getting hundreds of pieces of spam per week even with Earthlink’s so-called “Spamblocker” service. Now, it is true that the email address I was using had been out there for many years and was probably on a lot of spam lists by the Spring of 2005, but it became clear that Earthlink/Mindspring had a problem when I set up an email address that nobody else had and it started getting spam messages even though I was the only person in the universe who knew what the address was. Obviously, somebody was, and probably still is, targeting Earthlink big time. So, I gave up the Mindspring address and switched over to Google’s Gmail thanks to an invite from a good buddy.
The change has been amazing.
The number of spam messages I’ve gotten into my Gmail account is minimal and every single one of them has been caught by Google’s filters. I’ve also been much more careful about giving out my email address online than I was in the long ago past. At the same time, though, its clear that Google has some really good spam filters. I wonder why everyone doesn’t.
