Controlling the flood of spam using catchall

Posted by stuart as ,

I get a shitload of spam. We all do. I don’t even get up when I hear Austin Powers telling me “You’ve got mail baby, yeah!”. I would estimate that over 90% of all email I receive is spam.

I like signing up for stuff online. I figure giving my email address up is a small price to pay for a lot of the free goodies online.

To try to keep a handle on the spam, and a good way of working out who is selling your email address, and who isn’t, I use individual email addresses for each thing I sign up for online. By using a catch-all email address, I get all my mail forwarded to my ISP’s email account (I figure they’re probably better at keeping their mail server running than I am).

All email sent to (anything)@mydomainname.com gets sent to my ISP’s mail account.

For example, if I was signing up to mt own newsletter (if I had one), I’d use the address “pimpmypagerank@mydomainname.com”.

Then, every now and again, if I think the level of spam I’m getting increases, I sit down and start looking at the “to” addresses in the spam, and have fun working out who’s selling my details.

I know, I need to get out more.