I’ve had the same email address since before Gal Smiley was born, so going on four years now. I’ve used it to sign up for a few trusted websites that I shop at regularly, and I use it for all my personal email. All my friends and family know this address, and people who I haven’t talked to in several years can still get a hold of me at the same old place.
And now…violation! It seems that after all this time, my address has finally been discovered by the internet. Believe it or not, all these years, I have rarely, if ever, gotten a piece of spam. But in the past few weeks, I’ve gotten several virus email attachments, various spam advertisements, and weird emails asking me to click on an internet link of unknown origin. The word is out!
I blame my recent announcement to friends and family of the Wee One’s birth. I think someone out there that I sent the email to had a virus that picks up all the addresses in their inbox, and mails them something. Naturally we remain uninfected, because I am not an idiot, but somehow this other person’s infection has released my private info to the world. Either that, or someone who didn’t know my email before got it from the distlist, and served it up to an outside site, probably for a contest entry. Grrrr!
Sir Monkeypants thinks it was silly of me to send the announcement from my main account (I have a silly gmail address that I use for posting on public message boards and for other public type mailings). But I used my main address for Gal Smiley’s birth announcement, and nothing bad came of it, so I just didn’t think about it.
I must say I feel really upset about this. I’ve tried hard to keep my email address private, in that I don’t share it with public sites or put it on forms or anything like that. I’ll give out my phone number before I’ll give out my email to a stranger. My email provider has very little in the way of spam filtering, so now that the spam has started to seep through, it’ll only get worse from this point on.
I suppose I’ll have to get a new email address, at gmail probably, and find a way to forward from my old one to my new one. But I’ll still be bitter and angry. I hate spam!
TurtleHead 
You can probably use Gmail to do all of your emailing, even using the old account and none will be the wiser – it can masquerade pretty effectively. And then you get their spam filters, which are pretty good and constantly improved. I am using it for an email address that I have had for over ten years and has been in the wilds for much of that time. I barely ever see spam, even though I receive 1000s of pieces of it.
Try not to get too upset with others, or even the fact that your email has gotten out there. The amount of money spent on acquiring new email addresses, and figuring out ways of doing it is huge, HUGE. It would be very difficult to actually use an email address with any frequency and keep it out of the hands of spammers.
For example one way that someone could get it, using nothing of what you suggested, is just packet spying on the network itself. Email takes place on a separate port (channel) than everything else, the email software has gone to great pains to stop this from being possible. But it is all open source…
A good email client should make handling spam pretty easy — I wouldn’t fret about using a new address. Spam is kind of inevitable (as pointed out). Better to learn to deal with it well rather than try to avoid the issue by changing emails every few years.
Another thing that’s great about Gmail is that not only can you forward your main account’s email there, but you can create an alias on the account to make it look like you’re sending email from that address. I do this all of the time. For example, email comes in for my coordinating role to the coordinator email address that forwards to my Gmail account. When I hit Reply, Gmail sets the “reply to”/”from” address to match that address. Easy breezy.
I will try to calm down :). I just get resistant to change is all!
I’m going to work on password protecting the site first, when I get some time. After that I will ask you for more details about this forwarding/replying thing. I have a gmail account that is my name that I will probably start using, but I’m not sure I want it to get around, so putting the old email as my reply address is a good idea.
Ya, no one will ever know about the Gmail account. You can mask it completely under your main account. It’s sweet!