part 1 discuss how you disguise your e-mail address from spammers, now we will talk about some other useful techniques

subdomain addressing This is a rather new technology and only offered by some e-mail provider. I use “Fastmail.FM”:http://fastmail.fm/ so I will use it as example, it works the same way with “geekmail”:http://www.geekmail.com/, “MailSnare”:http://www.mailsnare.net/, “VFEmail”:http://www.vfemail.net/, “Yahoo! Mail Plus”:http://mailplus.yahoo.com/, etc.

Suppose your user name at Fastmail is hushpuppy, your e-mail address would be [email protected]. Your subdomain address is anything in the form [email protected]. the part before @ can be anything, and the message will get delivered to your mailbox. Now how is that useful??

Let’s say you need to give your e-mail address to a website called suspicious.com. You think there is a chance they will compromise your address, but you need something from them. What to do? enter [email protected] as e-mail address. They can send you e-mail (probably confirmation of some sort) without a problem. But if they do sell your address, you will start getting SPAM which are addressed to [email protected]. You will know where the spammer got your address from, and you can complain. It is also very easy to set a filter in your e-mail program to block anything which has [email protected].

In this way you will give different addresses to different website, so it will be something like:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

get it?

Admittedly subdomain addressing doesn’t normally come as part of free e-mail services, but at this time where you depends so much on your e-mail. I think it is worth it, and the $14.95 for life deal at “Fastmail.FM”:http://fastmail.fm/ is great value!