I already create new iCalendars every year to make archiving and syncing simple, now I’m considering doing the same for e-mail addresses. I wonder how much less SPAM I’d get if I only kept each address for a year.
I already create new iCalendars every year to make archiving and syncing simple, now I’m considering doing the same for e-mail addresses. I wonder how much less SPAM I’d get if I only kept each address for a year.
I think Steve Gibson (from GRC) does this.
I wanted to do it, but I think it’d be a slight hassle for my friends. Still, if they really wanted to e-mail me, they can find my e-mail address on my website, right?
Will you elaborate on how you’d go creating a new e-mail address every year, and the actions that’d go along with it?
I have my own domain, so adding and killing e-mail addresses isn’t very hard. I’d probably just do a lists07@example.com instead of lists@example.com set-up. Maybe set up an auto-responder to the last year’s address with a link to my contact page for a 1 year period or something like that.
I use tagged addresses, in virtually every context.
so, instead of @.com I use -@.com
I have nearly 500 of these tags. As soon as I get some spam to any tag. I can instantly block it (actually redirect to a special address which feeds into Sp@mX) and I know who did it.
I’ve seen that approach too, but it seems like too much hassle and doesn’t work well on business cards, etc.
Well, i have a rather nice web interface that i’ve written + Postfix virtual setup that makes it dead simple to tag addresses.
On business cards i’ve used a separate address, so far, I have not received any spam on that address. One particular family member of mine likes to forward stuff to massive numbers of people (To: or CC:’ing it, never “BCC” *sigh*).
I generally have to email this person monthly a new alias to use for me once their address starts to collect spam. The ignorance of youth.
I have a vendor that does much the same, using year@vendor.com, though he seems to rotate every quarter. This has created some confusion on our end in the past, until we figured out that emails sent to any of his addresses would eventually get to him. I can’t imagine how tedious that must be on his end though, assuming he’s sticking with it enough to make it worthwhile.
I’ve had good success with cPanel’s Boxtrapper, which requires anyone not on my server’s whitelist to acknowledge an autoresponder before it lets the email through. I’ve found this to be virtually maintenance free on my end, and far less confusing/annoying on the client’s end.
I don’t reply to challenge-response e-mail.
I have never understood this problem. I’ve used the same email address for well over a decade, and never gone to any significant lengths to hide it.
I use a good quality spam filter program on the mail server, and a mail program with a junk filter. Regularly and automatically updated, it just works. Last time I checked the raw mail, I was getting over a 1000 spams a day. But I get only a dozen or so into the junk folder, and maybe one or two make it into the inbox. Surely that’s manageable.
I complete agree that challenge-response is so annoying as to be worthless, but the current state of the art in spam filters seems to work fine. Am I missing something?