fighting spam

pjaj

Whilst it is virtually impossible to block all spam, it is even more annoying when a company with whom you do business sells your email address to all and sundry.
If you are techie minded there is a way of striking back.

1. You need an email provider who allows you to create multiple email addresses and permits one of the form *@your_id.com. This is a catch all address which can be diverted to your main email address. Sadly the big email providers don't provide this, but if, for example, you have your own domain it's relatively easy.
2. Whenever you have to provide an email address to a new supplier, give them a unique address of the form [EMAIL="new_supplier@your_id.com"]new_supplier@your_id.com[/EMAIL]. You don't actually create this address with your email provider.
3. If they want to contact you then their email will get diverted via *@your_id.com into your main account where you can read it and deal with it appropriately.
4. If someone then sells one of these addresses on to unwanted third parties and you start receiving junk from people you've never heard of, the address will identify the culprit. You can then name and shame them on, say Twitter or Facebook and / or use Web Of Trust and report them there, blacklisting their web site so that others are warned off doing business with them.

A variation is to also create a [EMAIL="spam@your_id.com"]spam@your_id.com[/EMAIL] address and divert all the catch all addresses there, but you will have to monitor this inbox.

aerostar

For gmail/googlemail you can use your original gmail/googlemail address but put a plus sign before the @ then the name of the company

(removed the @ to stop post showing as a mail link.)

EG
yourname at googlemail.com

becomes

yourname+companyname at googlemail.com

it will get delivered to your normal googlemail/gmail address.


With regard to other companies getting your address - quite often this is down to the user not reading carefully about the mail options, in that you can too easily give them the OK to pass on to other parties !

Watch those tick boxes as to the logic there.


If you really want a one time throw away address, say for a sign up and will not use again, then use mailinator.com

use

anynameyoulike at mailinator.com

do use something unique as there are no passwords to access the mails.

when any mail is sent to the address you made up, it will be kept for 24 hours then deleted.

to read the email go to mailinator.com enter the name you made up and you will see any mails for that name, you can delete as necessary.

This is especially good when you have to give a valid email address and do not want to use your own.

Neil49

Yahoo allow you to have up to 500 disposable email addresses with a name bearing no relation to your real email address.

So if you email address was mlewis@yahoo.co.uk you could set up diposable addresses starting with (for example) dcameron10-amazon@yahoo.co.uk or dcameron10-pcworld@yahoo.co.uk.

The dcameron10- name is fixed but after that you can have anything you like and delete them individually as required should you get lots of spam.

You can setup your account so that they go into a separate folder from your genuine emails if necessary.

For exisitng Yahoo users this feature is found under Options

pjaj

Thanks aerostar and Neil49, I wasn't aware that you could do that with the big boys. It makes the method more universal to apply.
Of course it does assume you have made sure that you didn't give them permission to sell you on by checking carefully all the tick boxes originally.

tronator

pjaj wrote: »

Whilst it is virtually impossible to block all spam, it is even more annoying when a company with whom you do business sells your email address to all and sundry.
If you are techie minded there is a way of striking back.

1. You need an email provider who allows you to create multiple email addresses and permits one of the form *@your_id.com. This is a catch all address which can be diverted to your main email address. Sadly the big email providers don't provide this, but if, for example, you have your own domain it's relatively easy.
2. Whenever you have to provide an email address to a new supplier, give them a unique address of the form [EMAIL="new_supplier@your_id.com"]new_supplier@your_id.com[/EMAIL]. You don't actually create this address with your email provider.
3. If they want to contact you then their email will get diverted via *@your_id.com into your main account where you can read it and deal with it appropriately.
4. If someone then sells one of these addresses on to unwanted third parties and you start receiving junk from people you've never heard of, the address will identify the culprit. You can then name and shame them on, say Twitter or Facebook and / or use Web Of Trust and report them there, blacklisting their web site so that others are warned off doing business with them.

A variation is to also create a [EMAIL="spam@your_id.com"]spam@your_id.com[/EMAIL] address and divert all the catch all addresses there, but you will have to monitor this inbox.

I would recommend using a subdomain for the catchall, otherwise you will receive a lot of spam to randomly generated email addresses on your main domain. The existence of a domain can be easily checked in the WHOIS, whereas it's not that easy to find out whether a subdomain exists.

tronator

I'm just getting a blast from the past

In the last few days I keep getting spam emails to my email address [EMAIL="force9.co.uk@subdomain.domain.tld"]force9.co.uk@subdomain.domain.tld[/EMAIL]

It appears that someone just found a more than 10 year old database of email addresses. Never got spam to this address, and now several a day. I've been with Force9 more than 10 years ago.

Time to put this email address into my "burnt addresses" filter on the server ...

kwikbreaks

I find that gmail spam filtering works very well for me without all the hassle of using multiple addresses. If I think whatever site I'm giving my email address may be a bit dodgy and don't want mail back from them over the longterm I use a disposable address from https://www.guerrillamail.com/#

enfield_freddy

a guy at british gas upset me , now every time I don't want spam , I allow the companies to send it to him

forgotmyname

I still use AOL for my some of my emails. The spam control is quite good. I can set it to block everything except the email addresses or domains that i specify.

So i can allow all from @moneysavingexpert.com or just martin@....

Anything else either goes in the bin or spam folder.

I do use a unique email for the comparison sites though. One of the addresses i used gets a ton of spam. Naughty of them.

peter999

pjaj wrote: »

Whilst it is virtually impossible to block all spam, it is even more annoying when a company with whom you do business sells your email address to all and sundry.
If you are techie minded there is a way of striking back.

1. You need an email provider who allows you to create multiple email addresses and permits one of the form *@your_id.com. This is a catch all address which can be diverted to your main email address. Sadly the big email providers don't provide this, but if, for example, you have your own domain it's relatively easy.
2. Whenever you have to provide an email address to a new supplier, give them a unique address of the form [EMAIL="new_supplier@your_id.com"]new_supplier@your_id.com[/EMAIL]. You don't actually create this address with your email provider.
3. If they want to contact you then their email will get diverted via *@your_id.com into your main account where you can read it and deal with it appropriately.
4. If someone then sells one of these addresses on to unwanted third parties and you start receiving junk from people you've never heard of, the address will identify the culprit. You can then name and shame them on, say Twitter or Facebook and / or use Web Of Trust and report them there, blacklisting their web site so that others are warned off doing business with them.

A variation is to also create a [EMAIL="spam@your_id.com"]spam@your_id.com[/EMAIL] address and divert all the catch all addresses there, but you will have to monitor this inbox.

I have email addresses I have never used which get spam.

It is is almost impossible to tell how or why an email address starts getting spam.

Rather than fighting a futile war on why or how your email address starts getting spam and naming/shaming, i've got better things to do.

It is better you have a number of email addresses and control their usage, use certain email address for important/known/reliable contacts, other email addresses for general marketing/information, other addresses for website sign-up etc, so you can delete addresses that get too much spam.

That should help to limit spam to certain email addresses, but won't stop it.

Stangely my oldest email address of 20 years which I only use for limited family contacts now gets no spam, in past it did get some spam,

tronator

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I find that gmail spam filtering works very well for me without all the hassle of using multiple addresses. If I think whatever site I'm giving my email address may be a bit dodgy and don't want mail back from them over the longterm I use a disposable address from https://www.guerrillamail.com/#

What hassle with multiple email addresses? I have a catchall at *@subdomain.domain.tld. I don't need to setup new email addresses every time.

I also don't want to use Gmail. My ESP already filters out some spam and the rest is caught by Thunderbird normally. I use disposable email addresses occasionally, but wouldn't use it for correspondence with my ISP.