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Neil Stone wrote: > One thing I have found to be a powerful tool in the past is a catchall > mail box, some people say that these are very very bad but in some cases > they are handy, let me explain why. > You shop online with Amazon, you give the email address > "amazon@xxxxxxxxxxxx" you shop with ebay giving "ebay@xxxxxxxxxxxx" both > lots of mail go to the same email account.. however.. when your mailbox > starts to get spammed you can easily see who gave your email address out > and send them a bill for wasting your time. This does mean of course > that you have to be strict with doing this, but if you're setting up > afresh it's simple enough. Nice ideal, but you'll never get a payoff. Not aware of any successful legal action of this (although I'd be interested to hear of one) but knowing who sold your details is cold comfort after the millionth request to transfer money out of Nigeria. > On the downside, someone could guess "blahblahblah@xxxxxxxxxxxx" and the > email get through.. you can always create mail filters for that in your MUA. This year I've stopped using catchalls after 11 years for all my domains and reduced spam by over 300%. I've tuned a pretty effective antispam setup (exim4, sa-exim, spamassassin, clamd, extension blocking and sanesecurities sigs) and keep quite accurate logs. At one point I was getting over a thousand spams a day with catchall addresses, a lot of them to addresses that never existed. Since going known-only I still get a 85-95% spam ratio but now in the low hundreds. FWIW, when dealing with non-mainstream sites I tend to use a gmail account. Their spam filtering is frankly amazing! -- Simon Avery -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html