I’m sick of e-mail spam. I’m sure anyone reading this is as sick of it as I am. Any small trick to alleviate spam is a welcome one.
A while ago I noticed quite a few FormSpring and Ponyfish customers registering email addresses like formspring@example.com or joe+formspring@example.com. These addresses forward to a main email account, but have the valuable benefit that if they receive spam at an address they know how the spammer got that address. If they get spam sent to that address, it can easily be blocked with a filter or junk mail rules.
Fortunately, a number of email providers are starting to support the name+tag@host scheme. I know Gmail supports it, and I was glad to read this week that my personal web host, DreamHost, now supports it.
Unfortunately, I bet it wouldn’t be long for spammers to figure out the scheme (if they haven’t already). It would be relatively easy to write a script that goes through an email list and removes the “+tag” part of the email address.
What would be wonderful would be if web hosts could let users define a different string to use instead of “+” to separate the account name from the tag. It would be impossible for a spammer to know that adeEVILSPAMformspring@example.com and adeEVILSPAMponyfish@example.com point to the real email address ade@example.com.
1 response so far ↓
1 Ed S. // Oct 11, 2006 at 11:56 am
I’ve been adding aliases for a long time so it’s a manual process for me but I use a dash separator. I always run with the assumption that at some point any email address I have will make its way into the hands of spammers just because a lot of services friends may use to send you links or invitations require an email address. In that respect I’m still searching for a really good server-side spam filter solution. Right now a lot if making its way through spamassassin so I even toyed with the idea of using rbl’s. Bah just thinking about it all makes me tired.
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