Beating the email cheaters...

I recently posted about Brand Bullying - being tricked or forced into buying domain names you don't want or need.

I received a good suggestion on how to handle a sort-of related problem, having to submit emails to web sites only to have them abuse them.

John Fraser from Back Of House. John said:

Kind of related to your scam item but also going beyond it.

I run a scheme whereby I very rarely give out my real email address, if I deal with dell the address I give them is dell@xyz.com.au which I set up to be an alias to my real email.

This takes me about a minute for each new outfit I deal with and provides me with a few major advantages

1.       If one of these email addresses starts to receive spam I know who has let it out

2.       I can cut off any alias that has become a spam magnet without impacting my main email

3.       If I want to change my an email address for any reason I don’t have to worry about how many (possibly important) other parties will be unable to contact me.

Anyone who has their own mail domain should be able to do this if they want to. 

So far it is working a treat and my spam has dwindled to almost nil … you might want to give it a whirl.

To elaborate, if you own your own domain name, for example I own www.ihatemypc.com.au, any email address that ends in @ihatemypc.com.au is also mine.

So if I visit a web site that wants my email address, such as Dell as in John's example, I can submit Dell@ihatemypc.com.au as my email address and it will come to me.

As the owner of the domain I have a couple of options. I can manage such email addresses individually, through my web hosting console, or I can use a "catch-all" account. It is really up to you.

A catch-all account is an email address that will receive any emails for email addresses that don't exist in my hosting set up. 

In this case I'd let the Dell@ihatemypc.com.au go to my catch-all account of david@ihatemypc.com.au until such time as I saw it misbehaving i.e. receiving spam. When that happened I could set up a filter to just delete all emails to that address, ring Dell and complain (see if they'll stop) or create the email account and handle the incoming emails individually via web mail or a client for the problem email address.

Things to note:

1) If you are on email-only hosting you may be charged for extra email addresses

2) You may be limited as to how many email addresses you can create.

3) Storing extra emails/spam may impact your web/email hosting data limits. Be careful about allocate storage to email accounts of this nature.

4) The strategies described here are an overview and somewhat general as hosting end email handling varies from provider to provider.

5) The strategies described here are a little technical and possibly tricky for the uninitiated. To avoid getting yourself in a pickle a) be very careful b) get an expert to help you.