It was in April of 2013 that I made a change to the way I use my email. Unlike most people, I don’t just have an email address, I have an email domain. And I use that entire domain namespace by creating a specific email address for every business I deal with.
My email server processes the emails against a blacklist instead of a whitelist. That means that I can create any email address I want, and it will get delivered to me unless I put it on a list to be blocked. That reduces the amount of administrative headache I have.
The purpose of this is so that I can tell where my emails are being lost, stolen, or sold. The instances of this in 2014 were pretty low. Someone got my paypal email from someone I did business with, some political spammer used a public records request to get my electric company email, and one website’s user database got hacked (and they won’t admit to it).
What I was a little fearful of when creating this wildcard email account was that some automated script would hit my mail server and try a whole slew of predictable emails, like admin@, webmaster@, accounting@, president@, etc. My wildcard account would catch these and I’d get inundated with mail. However, this hasn’t happened yet. I did get some spam by someone who guessed an email address using the firstname.lastname@ structure, so that email was then blocked.
My blacklist only has 6 entries, which I think is pretty good. And to not have any spam is plenty wonderful. I just did some checking and it seems my mail server software is rather old. I think an upgrade will be in order sometime this year.
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