New e-mail address idea

[salewit]

This may be old news to some/most/all of you, but I came up with this e-mail scheme that seems to work real well.

I have my default e-mail address here at Jag set to go to my ISP e-mail address. Whenever I go to a site that requires an e-mail address, I enter the name of the site plus my domain. For example, if I go to Virgin Atlantic, I give them the e-mail address of virginatlantic@mydomain.com. It's a totally valid e-mail address and I get any e-mail sent to me from them. If I go to CNN, I give them cnn@mydomain.com.

The beauty of this system is 1) I can easily go into the Jag CP and immediately set up an address to fail if it gets into spammer hands. 2) I don't have to worry about giving out an e-mail address anymore. 3) I can see if a company that is not supposed to give out or sell e-mail addresses, is!

Has anybody else tried this? I've been doing it for about 3 months now, and it works really, really well.

[Vin DSL]

Heh! Yeah, I started doing that 10 years ago. That's why I get 25k emails a day now...

It's kind of a fun game, the first few years, but then it'll get out-of-hand on you.

[Spathiphyllum]

Just mimicking Vin. Quite a few people on broadband do this quite routinely. Set up multiple email addys (that came with the throw-in webspace) for different things and when the spam gets too heavy, dump the addy and create a new one. Granted, people with the old, expired address won't be too happy but that's part of the round-robin needed to fight spammers. Vin probably just hasn't gotten around to changing that email addy.

Further, this helps protect your anonymity a tiny bit more without using such services as Yahoo or Hotmail.

[Ron]

I've actually "caught" both a bank and an RV club address being used by spammers. Both claim that they have no idea how the email address got into the spammers hands. In the case of the bank, I tend to believe them, soley because no other info has been used and my identity has not yet been stolen. Must have been a snoop program in the middle, or my address was in someone's pc there that got virated. (Is that a word?)

In the case of the RV club, however, the SPAM not only comes to "their" email addy, but also contains my wife's full name. Either they sold the info, or someone got a hold of their subscriber info. Either way, they're at fault. This has been happening for about a year. I just hope that they didn't get the other info (like our credit card data) at the same time.

[Gwaihir]

Got the same issue with a hotel reservation network. Seems their system is complete rubbish: the reservation never arrived at the hotel, but I do get lots of return-mails now from a virus.. No wonder their reservations don't arrive: everyone they sent to bounces them because of that virus. Now.. why did it have to pick ME as the fake sender .. Like you Ron, I can only hope it didn't compromise my credit card details.

Spathiphyllum: the idea is not just to be able to dump the address if warranted, but also to have the address identify the offender. In addition: dumping the address shouldn't displease any legitimate user, as there is just the one.