When I set up 3 emails addresses my forwarder allowed I set them up with 3 tiers in mind. The top tier was an address I gave to friends, family and other humans. The second one was one I used for companies I did business with or trusted (over time “trust” became more loosely defined). The bottom tier was for everything else. When spam became too much I would change the bottom address. If the second tier was also getting a lot of spam I’d drop it down to third and create a new tier 2 ID instead. I didn’t expect a lot of spam from the tier 1 ID.
It never quit worked out that way. When I first looked at changing addresses a few years ago I found that I got more spam sent to my ISP email address (Comcast). At the time they had a format for user IDs, which were also email addresses and it couldn’t be changed (at least that’s what I was told). So even though I never used that email address directly (I always used the forwarder) it was either easy enough to hit through automation (very likely) or there was a leak at the ISP. Changing the forwarding addresses wouldn’t have helped much. Instead I set up an additional mailbox they allowed and used that address for my forwarder. Any e-mail sent to the main Comcast was deleted by a rule if it made it past their filter to my inbox.
Within the last couple of years I’ve seen that some of the humans I gave my address to are sending me stuff from greeting card site, chain emails and other address collectors. So while I was careful in how I used the ID, some I had given it to were not. I suspected much of my spam was coming to that address. So I checked it out.
Both my forwarder and ISPs spam filters have been off for the past couple of days so everything has been coming to my desktop inbox and I’ve been looking at the distribution. I did get the most spam at the tier 3 address which got 54 spam emails. But my tier 1 address was a close second at 49 spam emails. My tier 2 address, the one I used for “trusted” sites received only 3 spam emails and all those came on one day and had the same structure so probably came from the same spammer.
While the sample size is much too small to draw any grand conclusions it seems obvious to me that my theory isn’t going to work for me. So not only is changing addresses is a pain, with notifications and all, it would also be useless. Time may tell me different, but I’m pleasantly surprised that the address I used for businesses or websites that seemed trustworthy has received very little spam.
I have more options these days than I did in the past. I can set up aliases for some of my mailboxes which allows me to give out different addresses but still have everything sent o one mailbox. And not there are multiple free email services available. I’ve already set up an address for people I trust to handle the email address wisely and sent out change of addresses.
I still haven’t decided what I want to do with the people I think caused my address to be added to spam lists. I considered an address change and education but I think that might be painful and not very productive. I’m considering giving each my prime suspects their own unique e-mail address and seeing if and when the spam starts arriving, and then compare it to the types of emails I’ve received from them. That evidence could make education easier. But since I do exchange emails with them I would have to set up identities on my end so I only exchange emails with them using the address I’ve given them. I’ll have to think about whether or not satisfying my curiosity is worth the effort.