This article inserts a statement made in the past tense, into the present.

The insertion is: “I Eliminated Spam From My Life Entirely.”

My projection is that I will have successfully eliminated all spam from my life within 1 month, and that in a series of articles denoted by steps, I will have created a helpful guide for you to eliminate spam from your life, as well.

Let’s start!

Assessing My Personal Spam Problem

19 email addresses (I run several websites).

So, that works out to 769.86 emails per day.

How did THAT happen? LOL.

I turned all spam filtering off because I periodically get important emails from people I either don’t know or haven’t heard from in a while. I didn’t want to miss any emails, so I just let everything through. And, due to particular circumstances demanding my full attention, I have neglected my inboxes for about 4 years now.

Tsk tsk, I know, but really, I had something very important to do…

That’s the email side of things.

How about spam on my websites?

Online — on websites and such — yes, my websites are pummeled with spam too.

This website currently has 2,500 “comments,” which is an oddly “round” number but here it is:

Taking Some Initial Steps (March 30, 2015)

Well, I turned on “SpamAssassin,” and it doubled my spam.

Taking Some Initial Steps (March 30, 2015)

OK, so I tried turning on “SpamAssassin,” which doubled my spam. I also turned on something called “Box Trapper,” which creates a sender challenge. I figured, if Box Trapper can unsubscribe from everything — but allow my friends, family, and business associates to just “verify” their emails — then I would be set.

But this is what my email looks like now:

So, I get a message stating that the emails that I sent “verification requests” to — cannot receive emails.

I also chatted with DreamHost’s tech support and they suggested I lower the spam score to “3” on all my email addresses — so I did that. Still — it didn’t seem to mean — or do — very much to make that change.

How Many Email Accounts Do I Have?

I have 1 free gmail account I generally do not use. I pay for two servers that also host email along with websites. I have about 19 email addresses, because I host several websites and you need to have email addresses to do so. Of my 19 email addresses, about 2-3 are personal email addresses that I would like to be able to use. The main email address I am seeking to reclaim is dainis@dainis.net.

An Imagined Solution

I want to be able to publish that email address wherever I like, and, for example, if it is the first time you are contacting me, then you need to go through a verification process. It’s not really complicated — and I do not wish to receive any email without having consented to receiving that email.

Very simple.

Next, I will seek some solution providers…