Luke Russell Anderson wriotes:
Then, when you are giving your email address to a company or submit it to a mailing list, simply state it is companyOrMailingListName@yourdomain.com. Jurgen gave the example of giving ones e-mail address to Canon Cameras where you would give them canon@yourdomain.com. The idea being that you can identify which company has sold your e-mail address, and/or block e-mail based on the "To:" Field.
Has anyone actually found any vaguely reputable website or mailing list that has sold an address on?
I started using mark-web@ for website sign-ups, and its been useful because the few email newsletters I get there from companies I deal with are separate from my normal email. But despite using one address for everything I've not yet received spam to it (touch wood!!).
The difficulty in using the suggested strategy is taht when you return to the site later (eg to buy add-ons for your Canon camera) you have to remember which email address you sued when you first visited. I find that near impossible given the number of sites I work with. If the pain has some gain, of-course, that would make sense. But does it?
For what it's worth that same address has been used to sign up at all sorts of places which might be classed as "risky" from the spam point of view. Eg forums and similar for one-off access to get the answer to something I've been tracking down, BitTorrent sites (by far the best way to download Linux distros, imho), etc.
[It goes without saying, I hope, that anywhere that is publically archived should be treated with more caution. Mailing lists, news groups, contact addresses on websites (unless spam-blocked in some way), etc.]