7 February 2006
My Spam Traps
There are a number of things I do to limit my spam reception. They do a fair job: I’ve been using the same address for years and it hasn’t been spammed.
In short, I own the domain alternateinterior.com. I have a single catchall email address, so anything@alternateinterior.com ends up in my inbox. All of those emails get forwarded upon reciept to another address which I keep private. Whenever I register for something, I use theirdomain@alternateinterior.com. That way, I know who sold my address and can avoid future business with that company.
By itself, that’s made it very easy to avoid spam. Spammers can forge return addresses, but my address has to be there for it to have arrived in my box. So I ban my own address and happily avoid spam.
These last few days, I’ve been bombarded with generic addresses I’ve never used. root@, support@, etc. Its been easy enough to recognize as spam but the sheer quantity has been bothering me. So my newest response is to set up the account root@alternateinterior.com but give it a 0MB quota. Any email that is sent to root will be bounced back with a quota exceeded error. Eye for an eye, if you will. Those new spams have been silent for a few hours now, so it must be working.