Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 10:12:14 -0800 (PST) To: (Vintners Net Customers) Subject: spam prevention -- using aliases on other sites Another useful technique to aid in spam prevention is to make liberal use of email aliases in your domain. Remember that your Vintners.Net email configuration forwards any email to any reasonable address at your domain to you, regardless of the specific address in the "To: " line. You can use this to aid in spam filtering in your email reader. You can also use it to help pinpoint if a website were to leak your email address. Whenever you go to a website and enter your email address, you're trusting that website not to give it out. By making up an email address for just that domain, you will be able to filter it out at any time in the future, and if you start getting spam to that address you'll know where the leak was. A good algorithm for making up an email address is to use your initials, followed by a dash, then their domain name followed of course by the at-sign and your domain name -- something like -@. For example, if I were to order something from ThisIsAFakeDomain.com, when I give it an email address, I would use something like . In the future, if I were to decide I never wanted to hear from them again, I could set up an email filter in my mailer to automatically discard that specific address. Additionally, if I were to get an unsolicted spam ad for porn, and it was addressed to ml-ThisIsAFakeDomain.com@vintners.net, I'd know it was "ThisIsAFakeDomain.com" who sold me out as nobody else would ever be given that address. This might even be useful in future lawsuits... Once using this method, you would then also be able to set up generalized filters in your email reader to block email to one of your aliases that did not originate from the sender in the address; in the above example I could reject any email to ml-ThisIsAFakeDomain.com@vintners.net that did not actually come from ThisIsAFakeDomain.com, thus I wouldn't even care if they leaked it. The most important thing to remember is to be consistent in your naming algorithm so that you can build filter rules using it -- always start with your initials and a dash (or some such). Then always have their complete domain name (dots, slashes and dashes are Ok). Overall address length is not important, it can be as long as you wish (within reason). Best of luck! -- Mike Lempriere; http://vintners.net/~mikel/ WA State resident: junk email prohibited by law: RCW19.190 & RCW19.86