First and foremost, NEVER EVER give your social security number or date of birth out to anyone you're not looking at face to face and know fully. While, I know GardenParty people are savvy enough to know this, someone else reading it might fall prey. Secondly, most of this stuff is urban legend. But more importantly, the link tells you the true way to get rid callers and mail, the right way. Excerpt from the link: "Returning junk mail to direct mailers on their dime (by stuffing it back into their postage-paid return envelopes) may cost them some money and provide you with a bit of personal satisfaction, but it won't cut down on the amount of junk mail you receive. In fact, it may actually increase your junk mail load, since the primary metric used to gauge the effectiveness of many direct mail campaigns is the number of responses received (even if those responses are negative). The best way to decrease the amount of unsolicited mail you receive is to register with the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) Mail Preference Service (MPS). The DMA maintains a "do not mail" file of MPS registrants which they regularly update and send to their members, who are required to remove the listed entries from their rosters of prospective customers targeted for mailings. (The file is also made available to non-DMA members, but they are under no obligation to use it.)" Here is a link that might be useful: Urban legend

You definitely don't have to use yahoo simply because you are with uverse. Just because they give you a free email address there nothing says you have to use it. I have never used the email address provided by my provider. I am with comcast they provide an email address, but I have never used it ever. I continue to use my Hotmail which I can access from any pc or tablet anywhere. Changing your address is really not a big deal anymore. Just send out a blanket email to your address book letting everyone know the new one. If you are registered at places with the email address then you can change it easily on the site, they all have an option for that. We all make changes, this is a fairly easy one.

*groan* ;) Well, at least I'm not a "Jack" ---------------------- Although I do wonder about some mail items I have been getting for the past 8 month, or so. Not often, but it is curious. The address is ours, but the names are not--and they are not of anyone that has ever lived at this address. Sometimes they are names of neighbors down the street (although I don't personally know them), or from other streets in our neighborhood. Thought maybe they just didn't want to give out their real address and gave fake numbers and used street names that were familiar. But it is not always the usual junk mail--they are service coupons from car dealerships, the type sent to recent customers. The last one was Rx discount cards, that have to be requested. Why request Rx cards and send them to an address that is not your own? Weird.

Yes, and most email programs will let you set up rules. So you could make a rule that anything that has, say, "Shark Tank" in the subject line goes straight to the trash. ETA Thanks, mamapinky. And you should also never bounce spam, because one of two things happens when you do that: 1. If the spammers didn't hide their real address, again they know they found a live one. (They usually random generate email addresses they send to, knowing that some will turn out to be real.) 2. Or what happens most often is that the poor hapless person whose address they spoofed as the sender gets thousands and thousands of bounced emails, while the spammers are free of them. FWIW, Houzz generates a lot of spam. If I go through a thread here about replacing old windows, for example, within an hour I start getting spam about Anderson windows and such.