Set Up a Default Email to Trap Spam
This is about a simple and free way to protect your identity online and reduce the amount of spam you receive every day. You should have firewalls and antivirus software installed on your computer and there are free ones available.
There are free anonymous browsing shields like Anonymizer <http://www.anonymizer.com/> and Tor <http://www.torproject.org/> or browsers that use them like Xerobank <https://xerobank.com/download/xb-browser/> and Opera Tor, <http://operator.en.softonic.com/>. They can be a lot of trouble to use and slow down your surfing and unless you’re involved in illegal online activity it may not be worth it.
You can protect your identity online. You can restrict cookies or use other techniques to instruct your browser not to give away your information but websites will refuse to serve you pages. Without using anonymous surfing your browser will give away your IP address and there are complex steps you can take so that does not benefit the snoop culture. Proper use of a great firewall like the freebasic version of ZoneAlarm <http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/free-upgrade-security-suite-zonealarm-firewall.htm> should suffice.
You can actually protect yourself from the internet surveillance culture composed of marketing researchers (like Google, AOL, and Microsoft), ISPs, governments, hackers, identity thieves, and other online snoops with a very basic change to your computer. Surfing the internet gives away your personal information so let’s just give them the wrong information. They will happily add the bogus information to their database and serve up the pages you requested.
This has an extra benefit to the internet as a whole. It corrupts the databases of the spy networks and makes them less valuable. That’s why they work so hard to defeat anonymous techniques. When their product is devalued they are less profitable. It’s just too bad we can’t make snooping so un rewarding that everyone quits stealing our privacy.
I hate to publish this on the internet because I've been using it for years to prevent spam. As soon as it becomes public knowledge it will probably be defeated by the internet spy culture but I will take a chance and share my secret. We will see how long it takes Google to figure out a work-around.
Simple Steps
About six months ago I was on a computer without this safeguard and within minutes began getting spam related to the unusual search I did. Install a second email client as your default client (you will never use). I use Microsoft Office Outlook (it came with my Vista Windows) as my default browser and retrieve my mail with Mozilla Thunderbird <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/>. Thunderbird has all my valid account information while the default Outlook has a bogus account.
Open your (bogus) email client and create a new bogus account. I use fooldu@gotcha.com because of the irony but you can use any fake email you choose. Try to use one that nobody will ever use since they would get spam from software that collects it. I doubt if the folks at Gotcha.com will use an email account for fooldu or even start a swimsuit line called Fooldu.
While you are setting up your account watch for a checkbox to “Manually” set up your account, otherwise it will try to verify your account. It won’t be able to verify it and will hang up in the process for quite a while. It will also detect your valid account and ask if you want to import it. Do not import it. If you accidently import it simply delete it. Finally, when your valid email account detects that it is not your default do not make it your default and uncheck the box to always check to see if it is your default client. Then just forget about it while that would be spam gets bounced back to all their clients.
Custom Search 
