Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Summary: This article will show you how to stop people abusing your email address or at least find out who did.
You start a company, you register a domain and you get yourself a nice email address with your name in it,
firstname.lastname@mydomain.com, and everything is great.
You now have a prestigious address at your own company and as nobody knows the email address, you receive no spam.
And then you register with a few online websites, known or not, and suddenly the spam starts to trickle in, more and more each day, until it turns into a flood that wastes your time and often contains risks such as phishing mails and viruses.
So what can you do? You can hardly change your name or company name. Listed below are a few options:
1. Use another email address
There are a lot of well known free email providers such as gmail.com,yahoo.com, hotmail.com, only to name a few, where you can get a free email address to receive your registration information.
Another option is to use a disposable email address, which saves you the hassle of having to close down your email address once you received what you needed to receive. A few of these: Mailinator, NoClickEmail, or10MinuteMail. Just Google for 'temporary email' to find more providers.
The downside of this method is that once your free or disposable email address is closed down, critical and genuine information can be missed.
2. Track usage of your email address
A little known fact is that you can append information before the @ sign in your address by using the + sign.
An example: you visit a website called spammersite.net and you are asked to register your email address.
For this, append +spammersite.net to your name, registering firstname.lastname+spammersite.net@mydomain.com. Emails sent to that address will be received on firstname.lastname@mydomain.com, but you will be able to see the extra information in the 'to:' field, showing you who has been messing with your information.
Note that although most providers support this, it will not work with some. Send a test mail to yourself (with the + suffix) to test if it works.
The downside of this method is that you are not stopping spam, but at least you can learn where it came from, taking legal steps to stop them.
If you have any questions regarding this or other articles in this blog, send an email to comments@leeandwhite.com after reviewing our Privacy Policy.