From previous Issue of Freedom From Bondage Print/PDF Newsletter
In today’s ever more complicated digital world it is becoming challenging to maintain one’s anonymity in the public. It is important to consider how the use of your email address might impact our own or anyone else’s anonymity as we recover and help to carry the message of recovery offered by the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous. A few simple suggestions can protect your identity and in turn your fellow OA members.
Overeaters Anonymous has published a wonderful set guidelines for protecting your anonymity in a digital world. Nothing suggested in the guidelines is particularly difficult to achieve. All of the suggestions go a long way to making a safer place for all of us. I strongly encourage you to take a few moments to read this document and to encourage others to read it as well. You can find the PDF at: https://oa.org/files/pdf/Anonymity-Guidelines-V2-proof.pdf.
This guideline sys “Within the OA Fellowship, members have the right to decide for themselves what they reveal. At the same time, we share a responsibility to guard the anonymity of our fellow members.” The problem is most of us don’t think through all of the ways we reveal who we are. One way is our email addresses. It is common to create email addresses with personal information including names, addresses, birthdates, etc… It says in the guidelines “We need to use caution in OA-related emails. We are publishing at the public level when we post on social media or blog. What we send or post may easily be seen, even repeated, by others within and outside the Fellowship. When we break our anonymity in digital media, we may inadvertently break the anonymity of others. Others may rightly or wrongly assume that our “virtual friends” are OA members.” When you give your email address to someone in OA, you can be assured that you have not broken your anonymity. When you give your email address to someone outside of Overeaters Anonymous, you cannot guarantee that your email address will be used in a responsible way. Likewise, when you put your email address in a document that is then posted on a website or distributed to people outside of Overeaters Anonymous, you are taking a chance that it will be used in an inappropriate way.
No, I don’t believe there is a nefarious organization who is trying to figure out who are the members of Overeaters Anonymous. But there are automated programs we call Bots and Spiders that are actively scanning the internet looking for information it can use for advertising and other ways of classify and categorizing people. Who knows what they are using this information for? The anonymity guidelines suggests that if you are in a service position that you create a new email address that identifies the service and not you. Just as you would not post your full name on a website, you should avoid putting your personal email address that identifies who you are into a website.
For example, John Smith would be losing his anonymity because his personal email address of “john_smith@ MyEmail.com” was posted on the internet. Even if his email address was jsmith@MyEmail.com or jhnsmth@MyEmail.com or smith1959831@MyEmail.com, too much information would be available that people in the public sector could easily figure out it is you. Adding address information makes it worse not better. For example jsmithwestervloh@MyEmail.com narrows down the Smiths with a J to Westerville Ohio even with the missing letters. It cannot be underestimated the sophistication of automated bots and spiders that are crawling over the internet.
Including your personal email address in a newsletter or flyer is not advised as well. You cannot guarantee the newsletter or flyer will not be shared with people who are not in OA. In fact we often give our newsletters and flyers to the public as a way of attracting people to OA. The newsletter or flyer may be posted to a website as a PDF document. Even though the document is a PDF doesn’t mean it is protected in any special way. When Mabel Brown in New York reads your email and they see john_smith@MyEmail.com, she knows that John Smith is a member of Overeaters Anonymous and thus, his anonymity has been compromised. So avoid putting personal email addresses and full names on any document that may be released to the public.
Instead create a new email address. There are many email services that are free or inexpensive to use that are available on the internet. You should do your due diligence and research which email service would best suit your needs. When you create the email account, you will be asked to create an email address. This is the time to be creative and avoid using email addresses that would identify you in anyway. Examples of good email addresses are: RecoveryIsCool@MyEmail.com, BananasIsntAFruit@MyEmail.com, AbstinentToday@MyEmail.com, or CSSISecretary@MyEmail.com. Email addresses should be short and easy to type but memorable. Using a phrase or the service position is better than something cryptic. While rcvyfrevr1@MyEmail.com is anonymous it is also difficult to type and not easily remembered.
Creating an anonymous email doesn’t mean you are abandoning your personal email address. What a pain it would be to contact everybody to let them know you are changing it. There are better options. For example, you can simply maintain two email addresses that you check; one for your private correspondence and the other for public communication. I maintain three email address, one for work, personal, and the last for my OA service position. I have all three setup on my phone, at work and on my personal laptop computer. The only problem I have found is that sometimes I am thinking I am sending email from one account and instead it gets sent out from another. However, I am getting into the habit of checking the from email address every time I send an email.
While this works you may not want to be checking two email accounts for your email. Another option is that you can forward the email from account to your personal email address. Much like when you move from one house to another, the post office sends your mail to your new address, you can configure your OA email account to forward the email to your personal email account. You also have the option save the email or just forward it. When you create the email account open the email program and look for the configuration, preferences, or options button / link. This will open a set of choices that you can use to customize the email account. In this case, look for the mail forwarding option. Add the email to the box provided. You can even forward the email to multiple addresses by adding the extra email addresses separated by a semi-colon. There may be a checkbox option to delete the email after it is sent on. Leave this checkbox unchecked to save the email in your inbox.
The nice thing about doing mail forwarding is you will get all of your email in your personal email account. This gives you a chance to read the email and decide if you want to respond. Avoid replying from your personal email account for emails you receive from people or organizations outside OA. It would be better to log into the second email account and send the email from there.
Setting up an anonymous email address is a very good idea that requires very little time. If you need help ask for it. There are many individuals in OA who are technically astute, who would be more than willing to give a helping or guiding hand. Before you give your personal anonymity away, take a moment to read the OA Guidelines and create an anonymous email address to use. As it says in the Anonymity Guidelines “A good idea to remember about anonymity in all environments, digital or otherwise, is to never share anything that you would not want to appear on the front page of the newspaper. While you may keep the anonymity of others, you cannot ensure that other people will keep yours.”
—Joel I.
–Region 5 Secretary
–R5Secretary@Outlook.com