Do you like spam? Do you think it's very informative? Is spam your primary source for Viagra and Cialis? Do you make lots of money from the spam stock tips your receive?

Spam blows. And it sucks.

So how do I plan to get rid of the shit? There is a little trick that can be used to cut down on spam and then even stop it when the need arises. In order to actually use this trick you need to own your own domain name. Now if you don't have one yet you are already behind the times, you should turn off your PC and go get your original Gameboy out of the closet.

There, now that you have your domain name you should use Google Apps to handle your email. You can access your email by the usual Google web interface or you can use secure POP and SMTP. You get Google's reasonable quality spam filters and antivirus by default and you can create up to 100 users with multiple email addresses. So does Google's spam filtering take care of the spam for you? Well, sort of. But it won't stop those painfully annoying jackass salesfuckers from sending you ads and announcements about webinars, seminars, security bullshit, great product news and even photos of grandma at Christmas. Just because they are not trying to sell you Viagra doesn't mean their email isn't total shit. But Google doesn't think it is total shit. Oh no, they think it should slip right through.

So now this is where you have to be diligent. There are three things you must do:

Now how the hell does this help? Well for starters, Bill Gates might be less likely to give away your email address since it will be obvious that he is the pinhead giving away your address. Next, it also gives you the ability to just drop the Bill Gates address if he turns out to be one of these shitheads who sends you spam, signs you up for all of his company's mailing lists and is a general fuck who sends you email jokes that consist of 20M Powerpoint presentations. I would strongly recommend not giving him a new address unless you really have to.

OK, the real question might be "How does all this relate to the subject of this post?". Well the problem for some individuals is that they use Microsoft Exchange for their email. This is a problem because it likes to resolve your sender name to your primary address every time you send an email. So there is an option in Outlook to send as bill.gates.387@mydomain.com but by the time he sees it your real.name@mydomain.com will be all over the message. I happen to have this exact problem. I have POP/SMTP enabled and I can use any client I like from any PC I like but there don't seem to be any decent clients available. The closest I have found so far is Thunderbird but it is choppy at best and has tons of stupid habits such as:

As fucked up as this may seem, I generally like the behaviour of Outlook except for its inability to properly understand an email account with multiple addresses. now what the hell am I supposed to do?