Dear LPG,

I am wondering how things have changed on the internet.  We users and potential consumers still get to access most of the information there for free, or so it seems, but have you noticed how so many more of those free sites where you enter the answers to a few questions to get some sort of assessment have changed? 

If your plan is to compare your current utility service provider with others possible alternatives , or find the best price of a ticket from your home town to your favourite holiday destination, it is more likely that you will be asked to provide your email address instead of being offered the immediate result that you would have expected to receive a few years ago. 

This is because less and less is given away for free these days.   In the same way that your home  address is the easiest way for any advertiser to get to you in the real world your virtual address is the way forward when they are trying to approach you via email. 

So once you have the information you need it is important to remember that most email service providers offer an option to block mail that you don’t want to be bombarded with. 

I know how much I am put off when I realise that giving my email address is more and more becoming the only way to access so much information these days, so the answer is to remember to learn how to block the emails that you don’t want.  Hotmail has a very good system that they call ‘Sweep’ which will allow users to limit the amount of emails that they can receive from any one sender and most other email services have a blocking facility at the very least.  I would advise readers to learn how it works, from someone they know who knows how.

KW, Catford.

LPG have found instruction as to how to do this if Hotmail is your email service provider, but if you Google ‘how to block unwanted emails on …’ and then add the name of your email service provider you are likely to find instructions.  YouTube will also offer instructions if you put the same phrase into their search box.

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