Surviving the Age of Cruft by Zach Shukan
Part 2: Spam I am

This is by far going to be the best article you have ever read! By the end of this article you will be able to lift ten times your own weight and speed read from miles away from the library. Also, your sex life will improve. Free money now!

Did you know that there is no federal law against spam in the U.S.? Just like identity theft, and the nuclear arms race, you can probably look forward to a ever-escalating future of spam. On the one hand, you should just get used to it. On the other hand, you should know what to do if it gets out of hand and what not to do if it gets out of hand.

1: Don't Reply
First off, don't ever reply to a piece of spam, it only encourages them. Even if it says "reply to remove" somewhere in the spam, don't do it. Believe it or not, your response tells the spammer that your e-mail address is indeed a real e-mail adress and that you are indeed a person who replies to your e-mails. Most spam has auto-generated your e-mail adress (and 15 million others), unlike snail mail which chose your adress from a mailing list. Sending spam is cheap and efficient for the spammer. Programs that generate spam advertise their capabilities in terms of how many millions of e-mails can be auto-generated per minute. Furthermore, as computers and the internet get faster these numbers will rise; and even if spammers represent a tiny segment of our species, you and your mother will only get more and more offers to enlarge your penis by 5 inches by christmas.

2: Keep your work and play separate
Don't ever use your real e-mail address for a service on the internet (there is one exception to this, which I will address in 4). You may ask, "but how do I sign up for a service that requires me to use a valid e-mail address if I don't use my real e-mail address?". This is where you must learn to exploit for the sake of avoiding the exploiter. One of the best ways to keep your spam intake low is to create a spam-only account. Even with the disappearance of most free services there are still lots of places that will give you a free e-mail account. Find one of these places and sign up for an account that you will never tell anyone who you actually like then use this e-mail address if you are going to sign up for any services on the internet that require an account.

3: The full headers provide a starting point in going after the spammer
You may wonder why you get spam that comes from your own address or from no address at all and this is because the 'reply-to' and 'from' addresses can be set to whatever the spammer wants, but the full headers don't lie*. Most e-mail programs and web e-mail services have a button or setting somewhere that lets you see the full headers for a particular e-mail message (see figure 2a).
If you do want to punish a spammer, you can't do it without first consulting the full headers. Despite the fact that there is little legal action you can take, most places that provide e-mail services also frown upon spammers using their precious bandwidth. If you want to report a spammer, find the last line that starts with "Received:" in your full headers and you will know what domain is the origin of your spam and that is who you can send a letter of complaint to. Be sure to include the full spam e-mail (including the full headers) as evidence in your complaint. For more information about reporting a spammer, go to http://spamcop.net/.

4: Using your own domain as a way to get autogenerated e-mail delivery services that you actually want
For a reasonable amount of money you can have your own domain and all of the @yourdomain address you could ever want. I'm not going to tell you which service to use, but I suggest finding one that allows you to add and remove forwarding addresses as much as you want. The reason you might want this is if you buy something online and you want to be able to receive receipts or updates on what you bought. If you use one primary e-mail address to buy things online you will find that the place you bought from will soon sell your e-mail address to other retailers who want to sell you similar things. And then all of the places that your e-mail address has been sold to will sell it to more places and then you're in for an endless supply of junk ads. You can easily stop this by just creating a new alias for each place you purchase something from. For instance, if you purchase something from Amazon, you can make an alias e-mail address called "amazon_order@yourdomain.com" and if you begin to get spam at that alias, you can easily delete that alias.