Cableman just pointed me to an article at PC Magazine called Disposable E-Mail Addresses. (Not the DEA you were thinking of, eh?)
DEA’s are a great tool in the anti-spam war. Whenever you need to give out your e-mail address to someone, you use a DEA. The DEA is used to forward mail to your real address. Then, if you start getting spam from that DEA, you just set up your e-mail client to filter out anything coming from it.
There are commercial services out there that provide DEA’s for you, like spamgourmet and sneakemail. But the cool part of the PC Mag article is that you might be able to create your own DEA’s for free.
Many e-mail servers ignore certain characters in addresses and deliver the message anyway. So, for example, if someone tries to send something to solonor+monkey@solonor.com, I will still get it. If I start getting a lot of spam where the TO: field is solonor+monkey@solonor.com, I just filter out anything addressed to that DEA. The only way you’ll know if it will work with your mail server is to try it.
Yeah, baby! Simple and cheap. Just like me.
You, sir, are a very smart man. 🙂
“The key to greatness is not to waste brain power figuring stuff out for yourself, but to plunder the research of others.” – Solonor (or someone I ripped off)
You can just set your default (main) email account on your server to accept anything addressed to @yourdomain.com… some are set up that way as a default, others have to be changed manually through your server’s email settings. Of course, you’ll need to have your own domain name for this to work.
Solonor, you just got me again with one of your titles. I’ve got to lower the sensitivity level on my excitement responder.
I use “nospam@…” as my email address when I’m expecting it to be passed right on to the spammers (and filter that email straight into the trash). Now I get spam reading “nospam! enlarge your penis”.