I see a lot of posts about people who say they create special email accounts just for spam. They don't want to really give their email address to a company or service in fear of spam so they then give this separate account.

If you are fortunate enough to own your own domain (not really all that expansive, $10 or less) you can have the ability to create a spam free email account. Receive only the emails that you are supposed to receive without having any false positives deleted by mistake. This also lets you track where exactly emails came from and know if a particular company has given your email address out to someone else.



I know a lot of you may be interested in this but I'm not sure how many would be able to do this since it requires you have your own domain name. Vote if this is something the interests you and if people are interested in it, I'll post up instructions on how to do it.

I don't get you Mike, I have 2 email accounts, one I give to my friends, and one I use for signing up to websites, business etc. these were both free and nothing to do with me owning my own domain at $10.

Have I missed the point?

i have never paid for an email address. i use my college email for college stuff. so thats spam free. i use another provider for web services and another for personal stuff

Originally Posted by TheRambler

I don't get you Mike, I have 2 email accounts, one I give to my friends, and one I use for signing up to websites, business etc. these were both free and nothing to do with me owning my own domain at $10.

Have I missed the point?

If you using a free email account thats great, no need to change anything.


However for people who have email accounts on their own domain, spam can be a big issue. Filtering spam can be a huge problem and why create multiple accounts when you can have just one spam free account. Like I said this is not for the average person thats why I made a poll to see if anyone one here would even be interested. There are services out there that people sign up to and pay monthly fee's just to filter email for their domain. Also some people even use GMail to host their domain email simply because GMail is great at spam filtering. But even as good as Gmail is it doesn't catch 100% of the spam.

A while back I came up with a simple trick that solves the issue with receiving spam and all you have to do is set a few simple rules.

Ahhhh, now that makes more sense, cheers for clarifying Mike

Well I have my own domain which I only use for family & friends and Gmails for other stuff .
So yes I am quite interested by your trick !!!

Why not just post your solution anyway? why do you need a poll to decide if its worth posting? I'm sure somebody will find it useful.

OK, well since I'm already getting responses saying they would like to know, I'll post my trick on how it is done.

This trick has two parts, The first part is being able to track who you gave your email address to and the second part it blacking spam.

Many people who how their own domain learn about creating a "Catch-ALL" email account. What a Catch-All email account does is it takes any email that is for an account that does not exist and deliver it to the email address you specify. People figure, this is great because I can turn on the Catch-All email address and then start registering online with websites by using the website name. An example would be, when registering for an account on Amazon.com your email used would be Amazon@yourdomain.com. You would then have a different email for each website and know if any of them give out or sell your email address. This also has the plus of not having to actually setup a physical email account for each site, you just give the address and all email goes to your single catch-all address. Blocking a website from spamming is also just as simple as you only need to block the unique email address you gave them.

The issue people run into almost immediately is that there are tones of spam bots that just send emails out to random email address's to all domains. They just try and guess random names @yourdomain.com for example Frank@yourdomain.com just in the chance that it exists and if not, in the change you have a catch all. You could start receiving thousands of these random spam emails each day just by enabling a Catch-All email address.

So how do you get around all of this and keep a 100% spam free inbox?



PART 1
#1 You need to create an email address that you will use as your main email account. You may already have your email account setup that you want to use and thats fine.
#2 You need to log into what ever manages your domain email accounts and enable Catch-All email account. Have all email for unknown accounts sent to your Main email address that you setup in step #1

PART 2
This is going to be where we filter out all spam emails.
#1 You need to come up with a small bit of text that is going to almost be like your secret code. It does not matter what this text is, just come up with something to use and make sure its something you are ok using as this will be used with all email address's that you give out. For the sake of this we will be using the code word "iPad" in this example.
#2 Now that you have decided on your code word this is how you will give out email address's to sites you want to sign up with. If we are signing up for Amazon.com I will register with the email address Amazon.iPad@yourdomain.com This means each site gets its own unique address followed by .iPad@yourdomain.com
#3 in your email account settings create a rule for incoming email that does the following. For any incoming email that does not have .iPad@yourdomain.com delete it.



Thats it, you now have a spam free catch-all email account that spam won't get to. I have been doing this for a few years and spam is no longer an issue.

Your plan is exactly what I need. I'll let you know how well it works.
BTW, I do not have a printer that will work from the pad, so I copied your info and pasted it to an email to myself that will also show up on my desktop.
Is there an easier way?
THANKS!