Pobox and managing spam?
 

Hello. My Pobox account due for renewal soon. I'm on the fence. Please give advice?

I like my username very much. But I don't use the account. Largely because it receives tons of spam. Hundreds of messages. On a daily basis.

My concern is that someday I'll try and make use of the account only to find that the spamwork is so daunting that there's no good reason for me to have paid for renewals year after year.

Do you readers have tips? Would an email client (rather than Web-based account settings) be useful, do you think?

Thanks!

You are plagued by spam and ask for advice.
I will pass on the advice I read in this forum some years ago and followed:
Buy your own domain name and use a different address on that domain for each purpose.
I did that and am very glad I did.
Nowadays I get maybe one piece of spam a week.
(Re e-mail clients - personally I have never seen the point of them - I can think of nothing an individual might reasonably want to do with e-mail that can't be done using Fastmail's web interface.)

I have 3 x accounts on my local client, Thunderbird - 2 x main accounts (separate providers) and my Gmail account.

Sometimes I like to copy e-mails between accounts, and although Gmail is basically my junk account, there are occasional e-mails I want to copy over.

It's much easier doing that in Thunderbird.

Added to that, Thunderbird also shows my calendars - another bonus.

I don't see why.

Calendars, plural?! You don't make life easy for yourself!

It is for me! :)

Blue calendar = advisory only
Red calendar = stuff that requires me to do something.
Magenta calendar = my work related calendar, to keep track of colleagues forthcoming holidays, etc.

Tons of spam? I’m very surprised. Pobox is very good in anti-spam. Did you read their tips in this?

I'm always curious why some people get tons of spam, but I get hardly any.

I assume it's because of people being free and easy - giving out their e-mail address anywhere and everywhere is sure to attract the spammers.

Or are they just unlucky?

This is actually one of the few genuine advantages of local email clients. Because you can see the Fastmail and other account as simply separate folder trees, to selectively copy or move individual or sets of messages between accounts is, indeed, very easy and intuitive.

The most obvious advantage of a local client is being able to access old emails when one doesn't have an internet connection. As connections have got faster and more stable that's less of an issue, but I still remember using a dial-up modem.

The email client I used to use had some facilities that I miss, eg

- the ability to process mails loaded from a file, on a one-off or scheduled basis. These could be emails exported from other mail clients, or emails generated as notifications by other software but not sent outside the machine, or (as I did for ages when getting used to that client) emails fetched by another client but duplicated during that fetch and fed into the second client as well

- the ability to edit any part of an incoming mail's content. I most often used that to change misleading subject headers to something meaningful to me, and to edit the references headers to separate from a parent mail a sub-thread that I wished to keep separate.

- the ability of a filter to write selected mails to a single external file (one after the other) or an external folder (as separate files) which meant those mails could be processed by external programs then reloaded using the first feature. One could eg use that to strip most of the headers off mails being archived, as although disk space is cheap etc halfing the size of an archive still helps speed things up, notably backing up the archives and searching them.

Agree 100%
I joined Pobox back in 2001 (using all years only webmail) and hardly see any false negative or false positive messages.

Thank you, everyone, for these comments!

My username is short and common. Along the lines of 'bob@' and 'john@ and 'oded@'. I don't use the email address much but ever since I snagged it I've seen tons of spam. [I suspect someone who held the username before I took it used the account heavily?] I've been keeping the username (renewing the account) as an 'insurance policy' -- in case, one day, my main (non-Pobox) username/account/service goes under.

If that's the case, why don't you just change it?

If the spam seems random, rather than something relevant to your own online activity, the short, common email address is probably the reason for the large volume. Many spammers try sending to common names at each domain, expecting a high proportion of them to hit active accounts.

Having the same doubt here. Been a user for almost 20 years. I'm not really sure if it's worthy anymore these days.

I have used POBox.com in the past and generally liked it a lot. Unusual amounts of spam are probably not related to POBox but instead to your very common user name, as you have heard from others. On the other hand, here is a question for you: does the spam end up in the spam folder, and therefore is it a problem? Having used a Gmail address for now about 15 years I get some spam but Gmail conveniently puts it in the spam folder, which I quickly check once in awhile for the odd false positive that ends up there too.