blog.sentrya.net

I cleaned 80% of spam in 2 days and fixed my “addiction” of constantly checking my email I’ve seen many people just give up their long-term email accounts just because it got filled with spam, scams and phishing emails — and it’s just sad. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty emotional about my account I made almost 2 decades ago, and I really didn’t want to lose it or just give up on it. It took me quite a few years of dwelling on this problem, and it wasn’t until 6 years ago when I got a job as a data entry assistant for a start-up operating in the data protection industry, and got introduced to this brand new world - that was my ‘Aha!’ moment. I learned a lot there, found what data is collected about us, consumers, by a lot of companies, how entitled many of them feel to do anything they want with our information, and how a large number of them “get back” at us when we try to distance ourselves from them. In simple terms, from the data they collect about us (name, email, phone number, shopping, browsing etc.), they can generate inferred data, like net worth, how much we’re worth to them as customers, and even predict future spending habits. In terms of “getting back” at us, many of them sell our information to others as soon as we unsubscribe from their marketing emails — this way they make up some of the loss resulted from their inability to market their products directly to us. Initially, I tried to solve the spam problem the same way everyone does - chasing after spammers, but since even tech giants like Google or Microsoft haven’t figured it out, I clearly had no chance of doing it, especially by myself. And then it clicked! Instead of chasing after scammers, which use an email or domain as a one-time thing, where they send a bunch of scams once and switch to a different email/domain, I asked myself - what’s constant? Scammers or actual subscriptions? I think it’s pretty obvious that subscriptions are constant for a lot of us. We may have hundreds of o