Domain Owners: Create your own Throwaway Email Addresses

If you own a domain, you have a great anti-spam tool at hand: your email server. All email to an address at your domain that does not already exist (such as “abc@mydomain.com”) is probably forwarded to your main account by default or a catch-all account.

You can use this feature to create throwaway email addresses on the fly:

* If you need to give an email address to sign up for something, make one up.

For example, if you sign up for a newsletter at ebb, enter “ebb@mydomain.com” as your email address.

If you get spam, have a look at the junk email’s headers. If ebb@mydomain.com shows up as the original recipient, you know who to blame: ebb. Nobody else even knew the address existed. Be aware, though, that spammers sometimes make up email addresses, and sometimes one they create can match one you created.

If the spam continues to arrive at the ebb@mydomain.com address, get rid of both the address and the spam by making any mail to ebb@mydomain.com bounce back to the sender.

The one downside of creating a catch-all account is that -any- email sent to your domain will be accepted and put in the ‘catch-all’ account.

Doug

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