Email catchall

Posted: January 15th, 2006 | Author: Michael R. Murphy | Filed under: General | 1 Comment »

I like to use fake email addresses. When I sign up for things where email is required but I’m not sure I ever want to hear from that company again,I give them a fake address at my domain; I usually use the company name @ my domain name dot com. That way when I get inundated with spam at that address,I know exactly who to hate.

I recently upgraded server software and my mail preferences for each hosted domain allow me to either bounce mail sent to non-existant accounts or specify a catchall,a real address that should get all the mail forwarded to it. The upgrade doesn’s call it a catchall but it still lets me forward mail for a non-existant account to any account I want. This time it comes pre-populated with the address associated with the owner of the account. Since it only makes sense to allow people to contact me about problems with my domain at a non-domain email address,this is one of my gmail accounts. Before I had them forwarding to a real address at my domain. The difference got me thinking.

I like having the ability to forward mail from madeup accounts so that I can keep track of what’s coming from where. Unfortunately,this opens me up to spam from companies that scan the whois registries and send junk to info @,sales@,and webmaster@ addresses on a regular basis. My gmail accounts automatically forward on to my real address so I don’s have to check them all the time but by keeping them in the middle,I get to take advantage of their spam filter. Any mail sent to a non-existant address that is truly junk gets filtered out by gmail’s spam filter and hopefully what’s left that gets forwarded to me is only what I signed up for and really want. A kind of convoluted way to a clean inbox but effective nonetheless. In fact,since I upgraded,I’ve been wondering at the decrease in volume of mail.

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One Comment on “Email catchall”

  1. 1 emily said at 11:15 am on January 23rd, 2006:

    i do the same thing. when i used to have http://emily.hypermart.net way back in the day, they had it set up so anything@emily.hypermart.net would forward to your real email. i used to track spam that way (like you said)

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