Free email protection service akapost isn't the only way to hide your email from spam bots and unknown correspondents, but it is one of the most hassle-free ways of doing it, for both mailer and respondent. Once you set up your account with akapost, you can use it as a simple redirection tool by posting it in forums or on your website (and then using the right filter for mail coming through it), or by writing directly to people you don't quite trust with your address yet. Add .akapost.com to a message sent directly from your protected, registered address, and your recipient just sees your akapost address, while any replies still come to you. akapost protects one email address for free, while charging for additional or group addresses.

Besieged by spam, reader Nick writes in:

You know how so many spam messages have Chinese or Russian writing in them? Well, what if one sets up a filter in Gmail to remove all messages containing common Chinese or Russian words? I'm trying to do that now, except I don't know Mandarin for "the" — I'm just finding short words.

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Most spam and phish-bait emails are easy to spot, but once in a while, some creative subject can leave you guessing whether a message is legitimate or not. If you're an Outlook user, the Productivity Portfolio blog recommends never opening those messages (and potentially proving your existence to said spammers); instead, use the "Message Options" dialogue, available with a right-click on any message, and check the reply-to address and header information for signs of fakery, such as slightly-spoofed email addresses (wa1mart.com, paypaI.com, and the like) and odd entries in the To: and X-Mailer field. You'll get a better chance of stopping the spam flow, and the satisfaction of not getting fooled again.

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You never have to decline 17 zombie bites again: Facebook finally offers long-overdue opt-out capabilities for applications and by sender. When you receive an application request, you can now click the "Block This Application" link to never see that application again, or if you have a friend who's particularly aggressive with the invites, you can also hit the "Ignore All Invites From This Friend." Can I get a Hallelujah! Update: A reader informs us that this has been in place since February. Apologies for the old news! We've been avoiding Facebook for awhile now because of all the, uh, application spam.

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Tech blogger Amit Agarwal has been receiving suspicious, spam-like alerts from his Google Calendar lately reminding him to collect millions from an ATM, among other things. If you've seen similar GCal spam, your first instinct may be that your account has been hacked. On the contrary, clever spammers are taking advantage of a Google Calendar feature that automatically adds events to your calendar as soon as you're invited—which means all a spammer needs to do is send his spam via GCal's Add Guests feature. To fix this, head to your GCal settings and find the entry labelled, "Automatically add invitations to my calendar," then switch from the default (Yes) to "No, only show invitations to which I have responded." Google should probably switch the default to No, but in the meantime, this tweak will do the trick.

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For the next two weeks, readers are submitting their best life hack for a chance to win an autographed copy of our new book, Upgrade Your Life.
If you own a domain name with an active catch-all email address, you know how spammers can pummel you with junk mail to every anyword@yourdomain.com email address they can automatically generate. When you have your own domain, you can to use site-specific addresses when you register for web services to track down spam sources (like amazon.com@yourdomain.com), but once you do that, you've got to keep your catch-all address open to junk mail as well. But Google Apps user Ray has a clever system that filters out catch-all junk but still lets him track exactly who's selling out his address. Here's how to set it up.

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Dear Lifehacker,
I don't know what I did to deserve it, but I've recently been hit with an overwhelming flood of foreign-language (primarily Russian) spam. I can't even read these emails, so I have no idea what the point is, other than to make my Gmail inbox a miserable place to be. What can I do?
Signed,
Exasperated English-Speaker

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The Digital Inspiration blog points out a Gmail trick that's been just under the surface all along (not that our commenters haven't noticed). Everyone who has an "name@gmail.com" address can also receive mail sent to "name@googlemail.com." What's the big deal? Well, knowing this gives you a stronger hand when you fight against spam, bacn, and all that other not-so-important but distracting email. Try giving out one or the other addresses to important, close contacts, while using the other for all the other stuff. What uses can you think of (or have used already) for this trick? Offer up the goods in the comments.

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reCAPTCHA an anti-spam tool for obscuring your email address on the web. And by using it, you're helping to 'proofread' for a project which is digitising books for the Internet Archive (I'm a big fan of IA because it hosts the Wayback Machine).

reCAPTCHA Mailhide helps protect your inbox from spambots by asking people to solve a reCAPTCHA before viewing your email address. It displays two words, and the user needs to type both words in to display your email address.

To put the reCAPTCHA tool on your website you can use an application plugin, a library for your programming language or an API - browse their list of resources for further info. It has plugins for Movable Type, WordPress and many other popular publishing apps.

[via Problogger]

US-centric: You no longer have to pay to opt out of annoying unsolicited snail mail: the Direct Marketing Association has dropped their dollar fee to get your name on their mailing preferences list. The DMA's member companies honor this... Read More »