Because we will be moving on a few months, we actually decided to start preparing now. In that preparation we began by looking at the countless archive boxes of stuff like utility bills, bank statements, apartment-related paperwork, etc. Every piece of paper involved in these things has name, address and often other more potentially dangerous information like social security or bank account numbers. This should make it obvious why I went out and bought a new paper shredder.

What's less obvious is that while shredding documents, and I mean thousands of pages, some papers only have my personal info on the first page of say 10. In that case, why waste time, energy and my shredder? I tear those up, rather than shred them. Sometimes, there are other peoples' names on these pages. It made me think of things like those "share this" links where you can put a friend's email address and send them the page URL. Can you trust these? I don't know, but I do know that every time I have changed my email because of spam, it takes only a week or two before I begin getting spam again.

The bottom line here is simple: think before you give your address out to a web service and think too before you give someone else's address, you may be compromising their email without knowing it. If you want to share a URL, copy it and email it to your friend, don't use the web link to do it except on a site you can trust 100%. (Is there such an animal?)

For your own safety, it's wise to use remailing services such as sneakemail.com or trashmail.net when subscribing to lists, services or whatever. Although you figure "hey, gmail (or hotmail or yahoo) is free, I'll just get another account" you will be better served by keeping even the free accounts private and using remailers for services you aren't sure of.

Sneakemail is a great service costing about $3 per month. Using it you can make up addresses on the fly for use with first contacts or mailing lists. Each address can be forwarded to your real address. When you reply, your real address is hidden from the person you write to. If you begin receiving spamor other abuse from this address, simply delete it.

While I'm a huge believer in the Internet as a source for great things, there are plenty of annoyances and even some danger inherent in its use, so be sure to check out some of these services to protect yourself.