Newsletters

[Kelly]

Out in internet land there are sites that will offer you a regular (daily, weekly) newsletter that contains (supposedly) useful information on feminization, cross dressing, and so on. All this for just turning over your email address.

I have found that, generally, this is a good way to ruin a perfectly good email account. Within days, sometimes hours, you inbox is filled with so much spam that your email account is rendered useless.

I say generally, because there is the occasional journalist out there that will not ignite a firestorm of marketing material. But it is rare.

So here is my question. Has anybody signed up and only received useful information? Conversely, are there any juicy horror stories you might be willing to share?

Kelly

[Carol Ann]

Very good advice

[Ralitsa]

So the lesson to be learned about the internet in general, is be very, VERY careful which email address you give to whom. Of course everyone needs at least 4 email addresses: 1 for work, 1 for personal business (banking, etc. ), 1 for family and friends, and 1 for spam. That is absolutely the bare minimum and I actually have a few more besides those. The one you use for personal business needs to be the most secure and that should be with a genuine email provider, with top quality filters, and whom you are paying. If you are not paying them, somebody else is, and that is where their interest will be. I highly recommend Fastmail, they are top quality and reasonably priced and I use them for my better addresses.

The important one though is your spam account, that should be with one of these free services (hotmail, gmail, or whatever) and you should never use your real name or mailing address or phone number because you automatically know they are selling everything they can to everyone they can. After that account is hopelessly corrupted, you just cancel it and get another one, or don't even bother cancelling it and let it clog up their email servers.
And never, ever, send something from your spam account to a clean account, because they do steal email address from your messages. And never give "free" services like Facebook, or Twitter a clean email address, because their whole business model is based on stealing data from you. Only after you've been associated with a service for a few years and they have not sold you out, should you consider letting them have a better email address. And I will finish off with: this is one of the only trustworthy free sites I've ever found. In the howevermany years I've been here I've never gotten spam related to my account here. It is however, very much the exception.