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.

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

Published: Dec 8, 2005, 6:00:00 AM - Modified: Mar 23, 2016, 3:48:15 AM by Ry4an Brase
Tags: ideas-built, software
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