Email Sub-Address Spam Frequency -------------------------------- My email server is configured such that email to ry4an-anything@ry4an.org gets correctly delivered to me. The dash and whatever is after it are retained but ignored completely. When I give an email address to a company, say Northwest Airlines,I'll give them an email address that shows to whom it was given, say ry4an``-nwa``@ry4an.org. By doing this I'm able to check which companies are giving/selling/leaking my email address to spammers. Some of the leaks are surprising -- just a few weeks after giving out ry4an-philmont for the first time, giving it to the Boy Scouts, I started getting porn spam on it. When I called to let them know about the leak they assured me it was impossible. Last month I decided to save all of my inbound spam and run some totals to see which sub-addresses got the most spam. Here are the counts: * 6427 total spam messages to ry4an.org in 34 days * 679 spam messages to plain ry4an*@*ry4an.org * the 10 most spammed sub-addresses were ======== ================ ================================================== Received Address Given to -------- ---------------- -------------------------------------------------- 2542 ry4an-slashdot Posted to http://slashdot.org 252 ry4an-dip Used in the Diplomacy community 159 ry4an-resume On my resume_ 141 ry4an-yahoo Given to yahoo.com 125 ry4an-cnet Byline for some articles I wrote 98 ry4an-oldenburg Defunct Oldenburg_ project 88 ry4an-poker Used at https://ry4an.org/poker/ 84 ry4an-tclug Given to the Twin Cities Linux Users' Group 62 ry4an-dns Used for all my domain registrations 44 ry4an-keysigning Posted at https://ry4an.org/keysigning/ ======== ================ ================================================== So it looks like the worst offenders aren't comanies to whom I've given my email address, but rather letting them get posted to the internet for automated crawlers to harvest. Gmail users: You can `do the same thing`_ using the plus sign. .. _do the same thing: http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Users/browse_thread/thread/dd2e8ed697d0e655/91cf1a1b0995912d **Comments** ------------------------- Yeah, the one I gave to United actually garners me the most spam. I emailed them to complain but was brushed off relatively quickly. -- Anonymous .. _Oldenburg: /unblog/post/2004-06-05/ .. _resume: /unblog/post/../resume/ .. date: 1134021600 .. tags: ideas-built,software