When I got my own domain in 2002, I created a bunch of email addresses to suit different purposes. I was determined not to let my personal email address be spammed like my old one.
Once an email address is spammed, it is as good as gone. My old email address, even though it laid unused for 4 years, was still spammed the last time I checked, one or two years back. It probably still is being spammed, I don't know, I have forgotten the password.
I separate my email addresses into:
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Personal | For all personal correspondence. It worked well for almost three years, then I got careless and used it inappropriately. I started getting junk mails last year. |
| Online presence | Used mainly to register for forums. Was working well, then I used it on some shady sites. It got spammed so badly that I have removed the account totally. I will restore it and see if the spammers have stopped. My guess is no. |
| Shopping | I use this when buying things online. No spam. The only problem is some sites use this for their newsletters as well. |
| Mailing list | I used this for public mailing lists. Spammed pretty badly too. |
| Newsletter | I use this for newsletters. No spam. |
You don't think I'm going to reveal the email addresses, are you?
I need to create a new personal email address, and then migrate the senders over semi-transparently. I'm going to create a auto-responder to tell the sender that I have changed my email address, and that he has to send an email to a one-time email address where I'll redirect him to my real email address.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| One time | I'll use this for one-time validation of senders before redirecting them to my new personal email address. I expect this to be spammed pretty badly. Luckily, this doesn't have to be a permanent email address and I can change it easily. |
| New personal | My new email address. Hopefully I'll keep it free from spam. |
| Web | I'm putting this on my website, in case anyone wants to contact me. I used to put my personal email address. Zero traffic on this one. |
| New mailing list | I'll create new accounts, one per mailing list. This will allow me to delete an account with no side effect. |
| Forum registration | I'll use this to register for forums. If I believe the forum does not leak my email address, I'll switch to another email address which I'll check more often. |
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Shopping, alt | I'm supposed to use this for my alternate PayPal account, but I haven't gone around using it yet. |
| No spam |
I created this because I read spammers won't target email addresses with
'spam' in them. Neh. But interestingly, after this account was filled up for
a few weeks (I gave it just a 1 MB quota), the spam stopped even after I
deleted all the emails away.
I'll change the 'spam' to 'nospam' and give it a try again. Maybe spammers ignore this keyword. |
| Trash | I've forgotten the purpose of this account. Spams stopped after the account was full. |