Here's a tip for controlling spam:
When you sign up for something online, like a newsletter or to make a purchase, you have to give out an email address. With this comes the risk of your address being harvested and used to send you spam.
Now there's a neat way of protecting yourself from this.
Imagine if you could use a separate email address for each and every service you sign up for. If you get spammed you will know from the address it is sent to who has let your address out and you can simply cut off the problem address. Say you sign up for my blog reminder service. You use the address davids_blogg@somethingorother.com. By magic whatever I send to that address gets redirected to your real address. If I subsequently sell that email address to a Russian mail-order bride site, you will know exactly who did it when you start getting their junk. You can then kill off that address and the junk will stop.
Today I received a sign-up from a disposable email address, which got me thinking about it. So I got my friend Google to find me a few free services that do just this. I picked a couple to test and settled on EndJunk. What attracted me to that one is that once signed up, I can think up a new address on the fly as I am filling in an online form, and EndJunk will simply intercept whatever comes to that address and forward it to your real address. I suggest you test a few to see which one will work best for you.
Do note that if you reply to something that comes in through such a redirection service, your real email address will be exposed. The best policy is to never reply to spam.
Comments (1)
I have been using services like this for some time. Last one was www.sneakemail.com
They have problems.
1. Their domains become listed in bulk email lists and are blacklisted from online form signups.
2. Spam filters don't like the domains used when the sites become popular.
3. You are stuck with the provider that may go out of business.
Now my solution is to have my own domain name setup to do the magic. Now I am not giving mine out but here is an example.
Purchase domain (www.ozace.com.au is a good place) Friend of mine :-)
Setup basic hosting account and have all email to your domain redirect to your real email address.
My pretend domain I just purchased is myname1.com
Ok I sign up to splatco.com mailing list with this email I would subscribe using splatco@myname1.com, if I signed up with Microsoft then it would be microsoft@myname1.com
If I get spam I can immediately know if it is splatco@myname1.com that splat is responsible and you setup a rule to bounce or delete that email address in your client or if hosted on the hosting server.
Now I see EndJunk.com are bringing in your own domain option and that is good, I have been asking sneakemail.com for years to do this as their domain name is becoming an issue. The only downside is if one day EndJunk.com closes or their business practice changes you have to start again.
Domain names are cheap and you get to keep them for life. Get one for your business and a decoy one.
I caught quicken out because they sold my specific email address for quicken to marketing company. Quicken denied vehemently that they did not and even explaining the system and that the email address sent to was quicken@myname1.com said it was a coincidence. I rang the marketing company and they admitted to buying the email addresses off of quicken. Anyone dealing with quicken with problems will know it was pointless waste of time to continue so I just put the email into a bounce list. Now if I was to get spam from splatco@myname1.com I would email splatco and ask them to explain as they may have had a virus, someone hack their computers or an employee made off with email database. There are many reasons for spam. A lot of free ecard sites collect your email, the recipients email for spam purposes. You know that option that says notify me when the card is collected well it should say [Spam me] Ahh the gift that keeps on giving :-)
Now this might not be for everyone and David seems to have picked a good site with potential at endjunk.com. I also must say sneakemail.com have some great features also and if they let me use my own domain I would be still paying them ;-)
A final trick that I see David tried at one time is to add the year. Eg splatco2007@myname1.com and increment it each year.
Posted by Ian | May 15, 2007 1:00 AM
Posted on May 15, 2007 01:00