I have recently decided that they are probably getting my fax number from web forms I fill out to purchase certain items. Since I have never gotten a useful fax from a website sale or company, I guess they have no use for the fax number. So the lesson is to give less information. Now I do have a different email address for web sites so I don't give them my primary address and that seems to divert much spam in to a secondary email box.

Now we have a published email address and we have private email addresses. We hardly ever get spam on our private email accounts. But we get a lot of spam on our published account. We get everything from penis extension to mortgage come-ons. I wonder how to limit spam on our public account? Ky and I trade managing the email on the public account and I get to give it up in March.

The newest, most disturbing thing that is happening is I am getting cold calls from stockbrokers trying to sell me stock. I laugh at every one who calls and ask them if they have seen the film Boiler Room. They get all huffy and tell me that they are legitimate. I haven't bought so much as a wisk broom from a telephone solicitor, why would I spend money with a stockbroker I have never met? By the way, I have a stockbroker named Vincent Signorile who never calls me. That's the way a stockbroker is supposed to act. They don't call you; you call them. They don't have "hot tips." Actually stockbrokers are legally prohibited from giving you their opinion, they must just give you facts and numbers. I wonder how they got my number? Vincent tells me that I am on a public list and it goes around. He tells me that they did so well in the 90s that they still have a taste for it and now that the market has bottomed out they are striking hard to sign people up to purchase what they think are under-valued stocks. Whether legitimate or not, why would anyone buy something from a salesman over the phone without doing serious research?

Now, I must admit, I do purchase things over the web with very little research. But most of the companies I buy from, I have at least heard of, like Amazon, Buy, CDW, J&R and others. Sometimes I take a flyer on some inexpensive item from someone I have never heard of that is possibly one guy in his basement with a computer, a charge account and a roll of stamps. I have yet to be burned on the web.

So even though I have been successful buying stuff on the web, be careful about giving too much information away on the web-forms. Establish a free email account so that you never give your primary account out. Never fill in optional fields. Alter your name with a fictional middle initial so you can track from where they are getting you name.

The best thing I ever did (not intentional) was to use my work address as my primary address. I never get phone solicitations at home. The name on the phone does, but I just tell them to fuck off. I never get junk mail at home. Nobody calls during the dinner hour. If you can give a voice mailbox number out as your phone number, so much the better.

If it's a sales call at home, at the very first clue that it's a sales person (usually within seconds), I interrupt them and say "I'm sorry, I'm not interested. Please remove my number from your database and never call again. Thank you, goodbye" and hang up. They can't get a word out.

The most idiotic sales calls are the ones where the call is made by a computer, and the person on the other end has to wait for the computer to confirm that someone has answered before transferring the call over to the human. There is always a long silent pause, then the human picks up. What a lame system -- a dead giveaway that it's a sales call.

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- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!

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There are *REAL* calls to Jay, who dispatched the marketers with his own brand of reverse psychology and wit

-Aaron

If someone calls, act interested at first, getting as much info about them as you can... then tell them not to call. If you tell them right away, they hang up and you don't know who they were, and they will call back.

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The best defense against spam is simple, says Kim Milford, head of security at DoIT: "Throw it away. Do not read it, do not answer it, do not respond to it." Here are some specifics:

--Don't read it. The spam you read might contain a Web bug, sort of a return receipt for the spammer. Merely opening the message notifies the spammer that you are an active target for future mailings. If a message looks like spam, just throw it away without reading it.

--Don't reply. If you reply, you're telling the spammer that you exist. It's an invitation for more spam.

I give that one out to all the websites and unknown people I meet on the internet and keep my other addresses private.

Funny... as many times as I give that address out, I receive hardly any spam from it. I'm guessing that "spam" in the address itself somehow gets the point across that there's virtually no chance the message will get read?

Also, when I have to fill out web forms in order to access a certain part of a site, unless I really WANT them to have my information I enter bogus information:

Name: No Spam
Address: 123 Nospam St.
City: Nospamville -- State: AK -- Zip: 12345
e-mail: spambucket@earthlink.net
username: nospam
password: nospam

I'm hoping that enough people will start doing this kind of thing so that the mailing lists that these companies are trying to "develop" will be so clogged up with bogus, garbage information that they will become useless.

Giving the address of the office of the state attorney could have a positive effect as well. If that office were to get all the spam mail normally sent to the citizens of the state, it might act on slowing the flow.