I’m helping my older neighbor deal with tons of spam email that she’s getting. For dealing with spam I thought about using thunderbird with with some extensions and making comprehensive filters. To reduce the volume in the future I thought about using deleteme and simplelogin so that her information doesn’t continue to be spread.
Anyone have thoughts on the approach or maybe improvements that could be better?
Like @merde@sh.itjust.works said, several accounts for a tech illiterate person is counter productive. Unsubscribe what you can unsubscribe and then filter rules on thunderbird like you proposed. That’s how I do it with my elderly parents.
Agreed, this is the only way. Multiple accounts for an elderly person is not going to work.
Thunderbird, and unsubscribe to everything that enters. That’ll cut your spam in half at least
So the complete answer:
- Dont subscribe to spam
- Use aliases for everything. Dont use an alias for “free discount news letter” etc. that you use for normal stuff
- Delete spam aliases often and get new ones
- Manually unsubscribe from stuff
- Turn off email notifications in some web services that are unnecessary spam
My MIL had this problem. I discovered that at the root of the issue was that she kept subscribing to stuff she found online for topics she was interested in. The easy she’d address it was to, every couple of years, simply abandon her email address and create a new one. Of course, it didn’t take long for her to start bring overwhelmed by spam, because it was her online behavior that was driving it.
I hate Google as much as the next person, but - outside of their ads - they do have a first-class anti-spam system. Even it can’t help if the user is subscribing to “learn the Truth about governmemt weather control!”
I do not know if this is an issue in your situation, but you might inquire. Again, even if you find a solution, it’ll only help a little if there’s another issue in play.
