Your Internet/E-Commerce E-mail Account

The primary purpose for having your third account is to help you mitigate the amount of junk and spam e-mail coming into your first two accounts. This third account is the one you would use when doing the vast majority of your e-commerce activities. If you are signing up for a new Internet service, purchasing something new on eBay, joining a new online community, getting a new book on Amazon, or doing any other e-commerce-related activities, you want this e-mail address and account so that you do not need to use either of your addresses from your first two accounts.

That is because your e-commerce activities and the providers of these e-commerce services (and their related auxiliary providers) are a source of a good portion of the junk and spam messages that are generated on the Net. The less that you use your first two accounts for e-commerce activities, the more likely it is you will not be inundated in either of these two accounts by related junk and spam messages. That will help you keep those accounts cleaner and more efficient, since you will not be weeding through as many “junk” messages that are integrated with the real messages you do need to give your attention. And the more “hidden” and less public you can keep your first two accounts, the more likely they will not be captured by truly unscrupulous spammers and phishers (a “phisher” is a spammer who tries to capture your personal and financial data via the Web and e-mail to carry out nefarious activities, such as stealing your bank account information and passwords to do illegal withdrawals).

That is why you should do all you can to limit the distribution of your work/professional e-mail address to only those you are conducting professional communications with, and why you should limit distribution of your personal account to close family and friends. And you should ask all of them to do the same—be conscientious and careful with the use and distribution of your e-mail accounts (spammers and phishers sometimes gather e-mail addresses by stealing names off of other e-mailer’s e-mail distribution lists, or by infecting someone’s account with a worm or “Trojan horse” virus to gain access to their address book/contacts list).

A Quick Tip: Tell your co-workers, clients, family, and friends to use the BCC field when they send out e-mails to groups of people. This is important because it adds one more layer of security to keep the spammers at bay—it makes it that much harder for them to find and use valid professional and personal e-mail addresses. When using the BCC, the recipients of the e-mail cannot see who else received that same e-mail, thus limiting the potential use of these e-mail addresses by unscrupulous characters.

“Ruthless” Administration. The beauty of having this third account is that it is an account that you can often administer ruthlessly. Think about it — no one that is truly important to you should be e-mailing you here — your professional and personal contacts should be e-mailing you in one of your other two accounts. The only thing you should be receiving in this third account is generic commercial correspondence.

Now, if you recently submitted an online order or joined a new Internet service or subscription, you may want or need to watch and read these messages. But if you know that you haven’t done any e-commerce activities recently, you can be pretty certain that most of the e-mail you are receiving in this account is junk or spam. That means you can be ruthless in your account management and administration—possibly even mass-deleting large batches of e-mails without ever even opening them. If you aren’t expecting anything important, and you know the people mailing you in this account are not direct personal or professional contacts, you can feel confident deleting these messages with little or no review. You can just “zap” them — delete them en masse.

If you don’t have a third account, which means that these junk messages are getting integrated into the messages that you are receiving in your personal and professional accounts, you probably have to go through them one by one and open and review many of them. You aren’t sure if they are junk or spam, so you have to check. You are likely to be much less efficient administering these messages, thus taking much more of your valuable time. Plus, you are likely to increase the risk of opening a message with an infected file (virus, worm, and so on). Having this third account helps take away some of the risk that would otherwise rest on your first two accounts. It also helps you find some extra time due to your ability to feel confident in mass-deleting junk and spam messages.

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