TIP: Know where your spam comes from.

stormshelterdave

I have used the described method for some time now and successfully used it to find out that one website gave my email to “selected partners” even though I ticked the box to say not to. I then complained and got them to stop it, then cancelled my subscription with them. Also, all mails to that mail address are now redirected to a hotmail account I never use.

The Idea:
Whenever I sign up to a web site I use their web address as the first part of the email (e.g. moneysavingexpert@exampledomain.co.uk.). Now if I receive an email I can check what mail address it was sent to and therefore which website it 'should' have come from.
I can do this because I own a .co.uk domain (e.g. exampledomain.co.uk). As part of the domain setup you can configure all mails sent to @exampledomain.co.uk to go to your normal email.

How To:
There are two ways (that I know of) to get unlimited email addresses.
1) Free: Some ISPs provide unlimited email addresses free when you register with them. Usually they take the form of '@yourusername.isp.co.uk'. This is pretty straight forward and mails should automatically be received by the one mail account.

2) Not Free: Which is the way I have done it.. and registered a domain. There are plenty of sites that offer this (I registered with ukreg.com for £2.95 p.a.). This method is more for someone who either wants the domain anyway (e.g. for your own website) or does not want to/cannot go to another ISP. In this instance you would use the configuration tool supplied when you register the domain to send all mails to your ‘real’ email (e.g. your.account@ntlworld.com)

Hope this is useful & understandable.

gunneradt

very good idea mate

wolfman

Nice idea, just switched to a new hosting environment. Only got 50 mail boxes (it's a cheaper .net/sql server enviroment) but that'll give me enough to use.

A nice way of reducing spam and seeing where some of it comes from.

cloud_dog

Alternatively, why not just create a throwaway hotmail / gmail account that you don't give a moneys about and sign up using this account, then you keep your domain e-mail for personal e-mail etc, etc.

cloud_dog

wolfman

True, although the above method helps identify where the spam is coming from, or who passed on your details.

Say I signed up with shop@wolfman.com to a website. I then later started getting loads of spam emails about offers etc... (but not from the original site I signed up for) then I could be reasonably certain that they'd passed on my details (which I wouldn't have given permission to do so).