This is my award-winning tip that was chosen as 'top
reader's tip' by Internet Magazine, the July 2002 issue.

"He's knocked the whole thing up into a step-by-step,
Expert Help-style walkthrough. Excellent stuff."
Dave Wilby, Acting Editor

Keep Spammers Away!
An alternative way of protecting yourself against spam

Do you think twice before giving your email address to a website due to the risk of spam?

I used to think more than twice until I devised this effective solution: redirection. Here I will show you how to use Cjb.net as a way of protecting yourself against unsolicited junk emails. Cjb.net provides URL redirection. When you open an account, which is for free, you also get unlimited number of email addresses under your domain name e.g. whateveryouwrite@yourname.cjb.net. This enables you to forward the emails that are sent to your cjb.net address to your main email account.

Cjb.net isn't the only option on the web - you can choose a different provider from many other URL redirection services, most of which are free in exchange for advertisement. Furthermore, you could buy your own domain name as I did.

You may also want to consider some other ideas to prevent spam.

Anyway, let's see how my technique works as we go step by step.

STEP 1  Sign up with Cjb.net

Connect to the Internet and go to www.cjb.net. On the first page, you will see a box that has www. on the left-hand side. Type the web address you would like to have and press the "Register it!" button to see if it is available.

Yes, it is! Now you can register it. Carry on - click on the hyperlink.

Fill out the form - your account will be activated immediately!

STEP 2  Find a spammer

You can now start giving your new email addresses. For the sake of simplicity and proof, when I need to provide an email address, I give a website an email address that includes its own domain name. For example, if I visited www.spammer.com and they asked for my email address to provide me with their service (whatever it is), I would give them spammer@bilston.cjb.net instead of my main Yahoo! address.

(Spammer.com is entirely the product of my imagination and such a website, at the time of writing, does not exist on the World Wide Web.
 

STEP 3 Discover the address

Suppose I received an unsolicited email. First, how can I find out which email address of mine the spammer got to send me the junk? When you receive a bulk mail, that is an email sent to many recipients at once, you usually can't see your email address in the To: address line as the sender may use bcc (blind carbon copy). If this happens, you can find out the email address to which they sent their spam by setting headers.

For example, you can do that in Yahoo! by clicking "Options" on the left menu and "Mail Preferences". Then select the option that says "all". Now you can go back to that junk email. Your "headers" will be quite long, and reveal the email address that was used to send you that irritating ad. Aha!.. spammer@bilston.cjb.net... Do you remember to whom we had given that address?
If you are using any other web-based email account or an email program like Outlook Express or Eudora, follow the relevant instructions to see the headers. You could also check your email from webmail.cjb.net to see the details as the copies of the emails you receive will remain there.

STEP 4 Redirect the address

Now we know who is to blame for it. We can then redirect this particular address to another address. To do this, you need to set aliases, which means forwarding some addresses to different ones. Go to www.cjb.net and click on "Modify Account" on the left menu. Type your username and password. Select "Mail Aliases" from the menu list. And then press the "Log In" button.

I would probably want to send the further junk emails to trashcan@JunkMailAccount.com or better (pay as you go!) webmaster@spammer.com so that every single email sent to spammer@bilston.cjb.net would go to the address I redirected, not to my current Yahoo! address.
 

Done! I won't see any of the emails sent through that address anymore unless I decide to remove the alias I set up. (You can set up up to 100 aliases.) I will continue to receive emails via my any other addresses i.e. furkan@bilston.cjb.net or whateveryouwritehere@bilston.cjb.net. If they are caught by spammers again, I know what to do. Good luck!