One of the most popular ways of dealing with the deluge of spam that people receive is to have two e-mail accounts. One e-mail account is used for private correspondence, and the other is used for giving out to websites etc. The thinking is that if this address ever becomes compromised (one of the rat bastards sells it, or it is posted somewhere and harvested), you can always dump it.
There is one major problem with this: all of the legitimate mail you receive at that address goes along with the address, and you will have to track down the websites and services you do want and resubscribe. Heck, if you resubscribe to the same service that compromised your e-mail address in the first place, you won’t have to wait long for spam to start flooding in. And let’s not forget the fact that since you receive legitimate e-mail at that address, even if you don’t get enough spam to consider dumping the address, you still have to sort through it.
This is where email quarantining comes in. Although I just invented that term, the concept is not new. The idea is that you give a different email address each time you sign up with a site. If your mail email address is john@doe.com you might sign up at ebay with john.ebay@doe.com or john-ebay@doe.com. These email “subaddresses” give you the ability to quarantine that account if it ever becomes compromised, without losing all of your other subaddresses, because if you get spam in your inbox, you know exactly where it came from.
There are a few for-pay services to do this, such as MailBlocks, but if you have your own server, or your own shared hosting, there is no reason you can’t fairly easily do this yourself. Yes, there is one extra step involved: you have to set up a new e-mail address and set it to forward to yourself. But on most cPanel interfaces, this is really really simple. For me, I enter the e-mail address, the password twice, click “Create,” click “Forwarding,” type in my address, uncheck “save a copy,” and then click “Save.”
Also, there is nothing stopping you from creating groups of addresses for multi-use. For example: some stupid newspapers’ websites require you to sign up (burn in hell, NYT). You could create john.newspapers@doe.com, and use that for all newspaper signups. Or you could create general purpose john.group001@doe.com addresses ahead of time and lump a number of signups into that address. This particularly would work well with signups you don’t expect to get any e-mail from, except for the initial “verify your address” message. It’s up to you how picky you want to be… but remember that every minute you spend protecting yourself against spam from the get go could end up saving you from receiving hundreds of pieces of spam. My hosting gives me 999 e-mail addresses. I use one, my website uses two, and my poor mother who was about to rip her hair out or call it quits with e-mail after her AOL and Hotmail experiences has one. If I have to use every single one of my 995 remaining addresses to keep myself spam free, it will be worth it.
I am currently in the process of adding in those subaddresses and changing my e-mail settings at various sites. For the time being, I am still using KnowSpam, which is a one-time challenge/response human verification whitelist service. My hope is that with judicious use of email quarantining, I will no longer need to use this service, or at least will only have to employ it for addresses I think are likely to get spammed.
I’ll report back in a few months to let you know how it’s going.
Addendum: Another thing you can do when you set up a subaddress for a specific service, is set up an e-mail filter on your server or in your e-mail client that filters all e-mail that comes through that subaddress that is not from the website on which you deployed the subaddress.
Morgs says
Would this work if you had your email account set to ‘Straymail’ so that it caught anything that went to anything@yourdomain.com ?
Mark says
Why would you do that? Seems like a way to attract a lot of spam and ZERO legitimate communication.