Email spam is one of the great annoyances of the modern age. Sometimes it seems that no sooner have you created your new email address than it is deluged with spam.
Spam filters help to alleviate the problem, but they're far from perfect. They often miss spam and allow it through, whilst mistakenly filtering out genuine emails.
Yet spam is completely preventable.
The solution is called disposable email addresses.
The idea is to have an infinite number of email addresses which can be blocked at a moment's notice. Say, for example, your name is John Smith. You would set up a catch-all email address at johnsmith.yourcompany.com. This means that no matter what you put in front of the '@', it all goes to the same inbox.
Then, whenever anybody asks you for your email address, you give them a new one. It's a good idea to give them something so that you can recognise where it came from. So if Joe Bloggs asks for your email address, you give them
So how does this stop spam?
Well, let's say you receive a piece of spam at
So, you can now block that email address so that you can't get any more spam from it. You can also give Joe Bloggs a telling off, or advise him to do a full virus scan, depending on how you feel.
The other thing that you may notice is that you start getting LinkedIn requests, and Twitter requests, and Facebook requests emailed to you at
This method is not for the non-techies, it requires a bit of setup, and more importantly, it requires consistency and effort. There is no point setting this up if you don't stick to the system. It's not as trivial as just switching on a spam filter and forgetting about it (until it goes wrong). But the results are much better.
