Werner Fleck wrote:
I'm using a different email address for almost every party I communicate with. This way I can trace who is giving away my email address and I can block an address if it is misused. The drawback is, that I cannot use something like check_goodrcptto because I do not know all the addresses I have given away.
I also use dedicated addresses for communicating with businesses, institutions, and websites. For general correspondence I use an email address with one letter and one digit, and I increment the digit each year. This has at least two advantages:
Many worms will not harvest email addresses with less than three characters, so I won't be bothered when my correspondents catch malware.
After a few years, when the spam ratio is close to 100%, I look through my email archive to check whether I've received any legitimate email at the old address during the past 12 months, and then I retire it, which means I add it to the verybadrcptto file (for the check_verybadrcptto plugin). This not only stops the flow of spam to the one retired address, but because many spammers send to multiple addresses at the same domain and the retired address has had a few years to get passed around, it also protects current addresses. The best thing about this system is that it becomes smarter over the years! The more addresses that the spammers collect for my domains, the more likely they'll hit a very bad one.
I'm even contemplating seeding my websites with very bad addresses, but I haven't tried this out yet.
The obvious disadvantage is that your correspondents will have to update your email address regularly. You can still give a dedicated address to those who complain, but I have yet to encounter one who does.
Hans
