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Giving Your E-mail Address to Others - Sparingly

Consider your e-mail address as you would your home address. You need to give it to others to receive your mail, but protect it from those who will abuse the information or do not know how to protect your address. For this reason, give your home e-mail address sparingly and with your boundaries.

When people ask me for my e-mail address, I have usually had time to discover if they will abuse my addresses by selling it to others or forward lots of junk mail to me. In the second situation, people for various reasons tend to forward what they like reading to me, such as jokes, sobby stories, and more. At other times, people want addresses for solicitation purposes and sell addresses to other companies. Mailing lists were big business before the Internet and that remains the same today.

Friends who have your e-mail address may not understand how to protect your e-mail and thus, forward e-mails with other addresses to you and would forward your address to others. Feel free to inform them of your specific boundaries. A sample letter explaining how to forward e-mail is included in this guide or by clicking here.

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Section 1

Protection from
Junk Mail

Sign Up for a
Free E-mail Box
A "Junk mail" Box

Special Notice
for AOL Users

Give Your
E-mail Address to Others Sparingly

Carefully Screen Internet Sites that Ask For Your E-mail Use Your
"Junk mail" Box

Setting Up Your "Junk mail" Account in Outlook Express

Sample Letter to Send Friends
Who Send Junk mail