For those of us who have been using email for many years, spam is a necessary evil. We deal with it as a consequence of having such a speedy digital communication system at our fingertips and manage it as well as we can by using a spam-filter and occasionally sifting through our spam folder to fish out the rare, wrongly-accused message.
Occasionally, though, I find myself wondering if there might be a better way to handle spam. I mean, my spam filter separates incoming messages into just two groups: genuine emails and unwanted solicitations. Spam (and life) is rarely so black and white. There are many degrees of spam. For instance, coupons from the bookstore that I frequent are more valuable to me than, say, random offers of outrageous wealth from foreign royalty. But unless I put my bookstore’s email addresses on my spam-filter’s whitelist, my spam-filter will treat them the same.
You can have the best spam filter around, but if you’re giving your e-mail address out on pubic forums, websites, or to people you don’t know well, then you are compromising the security and privacy of your e-mail address. It’s a well-known fact that spammers automatically collect e-mail addressed that users post online (known as email scraping).
