posted November 02, 2005 10:15 PM            

Question: Does one's e-mail on e-bay increase the chances of
spam and porn? If so, does anyone know of a Plan-B?

Thanks.

posted November 02, 2005 11:11 PM            

quote:

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Question: Does one's e-mail on e-bay increase the chances of
spam and porn? If so, does anyone know of a Plan-B

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That said, if you're this concerned about spam and porn, you ought to get a real email service (not just the 'free' accounts that come with your Internet Service) or consider running your own server. EMail is, by its very nature, non-secured. You'd probably be amazed at how easy it is to snatch emails off the wire and/or from the server(s) they land on in transit. The real pros at email harvesting don't bother with 'posted' addresses like they used to. However, there are some excellent tools that can run on the email server to validate the authenticity of the sender. I use MDaemon on my commercial servers. With 2500+ mail boxes, I average about 0.04% of junk main and almost none of it is porn email (those are really easy to identify). My primary server handles an average of 3,700 emails an hour (during normal business hours). The problem however, is that it takes time and diligence to fine-tune your spam filtering and to keep on top of it. Most ISP 'throw in' email a few accounts because it really doesn't cost them much extra...so long as they don't need to spend a lot of man hours to keep junk mail out. Therefore your 'free' email is far more susceptible to junk than a professionally administered account would be.

To me though, I'd be more worried about going into a part-time business with 2 other people! How much markup are you hoping for to sustain any kind of reasonable part-time profit slit 3 ways? Selling on ebay is not all that difficult to master, so I can't imagine you need that much help, unless of course, these are silent partners putting in some start-up capital.

posted November 02, 2005 11:52 PM            

You can also forward email from your gmail account to any other email address.

Or you can just use gmail in the "regular way", and access it using your web browser.

It is also good for receiving large files that your ISP-provided email account may not accept. There is about 2.5gb or thereabouts of space available for each gmail user.

I believe you still need an "invitation" so you can sign up on gmail. If you want sone, send a request to me, melville.theatre, at gmail.com

posted November 03, 2005 04:29 AM            

quote:

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they do get a lot of fake mail asking them to
login to eBay, PayPal, etc. I think he said 1+ a day.

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I'm getting those as well and don't do anything with eBay or PayPal. They simply "spam their list".

Knuth

posted November 03, 2005 09:26 AM            

In fact the e-mail service I've been using for both my personal and eBay e-mails has turned out to be relatively spam free even though I've turned off the server based spam filter. My personal account gets maybe 1 or 2 dozen a week and after my local spam filter finishes with them I might actually see about a quarter of those.

One thing I do recommend, set up an e-mail address/account specifically for your eBay activities and avoid the free services if you can because eBay does watch for those and will require extra effort from you to proove who you are if you do use a free e-mail service.

I know because I had to go through it myself even though the e-mail service I use isn't free. The reason turned out that the service I use does offer a 30 day free trial which can be abused.

I now know that the e-mail service does provide an alternate TLD that's only usable if you are a paid user to get arround free service problems associated with their main TLD (.com)

------------------
Gene Warner
Seek the aid of those not men to quench the fires of war,
Else Evil triumphant will ascend and rule forevermore.

posted November 03, 2005 11:49 AM            

quote:

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you ought to get a real email service (not just the 'free' accounts that come with your Internet Service)

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Regards,

posted November 03, 2005 12:53 PM            

But how many false positives, i.e. genuine non-spam messages that have been black-holed before you ever see them?

That's my biggest problem with mail filtering, and why I have my ISP's spam filter turned off for my main email account.

posted November 03, 2005 05:25 PM            

quote:

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perhaps, "You ought to get an email service from a good provider."

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You also have the option of filtering software on your PC, but I find it better to deal with the junk at the server level. There are lots of good reasons for this preference, but I won't get into them all unless someone really wants to get into it all.

Bottom line on the original question though, is you won't incur a higher amount of span simply by starting to sell on eBay.