www.jerrystout.us

If you have your own domain registered and the package comes with a bazillion e-mail accounts, here’s what I do to virtually eliminate spam. Not that you won’t get it, but you’ll get it 95% less and you’ll know “exactly” who it was that sold you out. How much hell you choose to raise with that company from there is your choice.

Using this method will take a little investment of your time initially, but the outcome is well worth it.

Now that you have your domain, here’s what you do to fight (and catch) the spam monsters:

1. Gather up a list of any and all important accounts tied to whatever e-mail address you currently use. Write those company/website addresses down.

2. Use this naming scheme to generate your new e-mail addresses. So, for example, if you have three important accounts with Sears, eBay, and LifeHacker, here’s what your new e-mail accounts will be for those three accounts:

sears@yourdomain.com
ebay@yourdomain.com
lifehacker@yourdomain.com

I’ve got about 50, but you get the point. Write them all down (or type them) and then log on to your webhost’s control panel and get ready to create some new addresses !

3. Once logged on to your control panel or v-deck or whatever it is that your host uses, go to the e-mail section and select “create new account”. This is where you’ll create the new e-mail address to coincide with all those “important” accounts you wrote down.

IMPORTANT: To make things a LOT easier on yourself follow these two rules: (1) use the same password (a real good one) for all accounts you create and (2) forward each and every one of these accounts to your primary account, you know, the one you won’t give out to anyone.

4. Once all your accounts are created, and passwords and forwarding are set, try out a couple at random. Send an e-mail from your PC to sears@yourdomain.com. You’ll receive it (if everything’s working right) at your primary address but in the “To:” section it should show sears@yourdomain.com.

5. Now comes the next “fun part.” Log into all of those accounts you created new addresses for and change your contact info for each account to reflect the newly created address. Yeah, it’ll take a bit of time …

6. If you already have a domain and have an account you’ve created for yourself to give out to friends and family then it’s time to create another – one that you give out to nobody ! Nobody period ! This is the one you that all of the accounts you created will forward to and it won’t be used for anything else, not even for sending from. If you Don’t already have a domain but are getting one and want to do this, then you’ll want to create two accounts – the one you give out to friends and family and the secret one that nobody gets.

(I don’t know about everyone else, but friends and family can be bad about putting your address in the “To:” field with 50 other addresses when they send out their daily funniest joke, visible to the world, instead of all in the “BCC:” field. Most of the time it’s harmless but you never know who out of that bunch might decide they’d like to make a little money by collecting addresses and selling them to some spammer. Hey, it could happen !)

By now I’m sure some of you are thinking “what’s the friggin’ point of all of this ?”

Case in point: I’ve never gotten spam on any of the addresses I created, but about two weeks ago I did … and since then it’s escalated to a few a week, all addressed to one address – domaindirect@mydomain.com. It can only be one of two scenarios: Either they sold me out to some affiliate of theirs, or their e-mail database was compromised. My money is on the former. I used to use them until fairly recently and maybe that’s their way of getting back since I dropped them as my domain registrar. If that’s the case, then they’ve lost me for life. I don’t know yet. I wrote them as asked why I’m getting spammed at that address, and explained that they are the ONLY company that I use that address for. Have I heard back ? Of course not. I’m still waiting on someone to pick out one of the “canned” response e-mails to see how far off-base they are with an explanation.

Wow, I’m getting way off course. Now that the domaindirect@mydomain.com has been compromised what do I do ? Well, I logged into my domaindirect account and changed my contact e-mail address to my “you’re on my poop list” Gmail account. All mail sent to there gets forwarded to my main domain account and I let Gmail’s great spam filter deal with it. Then I logged into my control panel and deleted the domaindirect@mydomain.com account I created.

That’s about it. Of course this is my scenario and your mileage will vary. You can use your Yahoo or Hotmail account to do the same thing, or just set-up local filtering in Outlook or whatever if that’s to much of a pain.

If you ever need to reply to, or initiate, an e-mail from any of these accounts it only takes a couple of minutes to set one up in your local e-mail client or you can just log into your webmail feature of your host and do it from there. For me, it’s been extremely rare that I’ve needed to.

One more note, “always” use a disposable address (like mailinator or any of the others) for one time sign-up deals, or for anything that looks even remotely suspicious, if no login is available on bugmenot.

I may have left something out, but hopefully you’ll get the idea and this helps out some folks who absolutely hate spam … and like it even better when they can nail someone to the wall for “selling them out.”

1. Secure Steve says:

   December 5, 2005 at 21:26

   This is an awesome list. I also employ a similar method to keep track of where emails are coming from. So far I have been fine with my main email address, with the occasional bit of spam coming through one of my site specific addresses.
2. Jerry says:

   December 6, 2005 at 08:12

   Same here, Steve – so far so good. I’ve had this setup in place for about three years now.
3. Secure Steve says:

   December 7, 2005 at 10:19

   I havent been doing it for that long, but ever since I got my new domain strictly for email I’ve employed it.