DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

One of the worst things about the Internet is that owning a domain name requires that you publish personal contact information in a public directory, where every con artist and scammer in the world can access it. Within a few days of registering a domain name, expect the flood to begin: junk mail and spam, pushing mortgage scams, diet pills, herbal viagra, porn, “easier” web hosting, and a load of other unappealing crap, delivered to every address you’ve provided, whether physical or electronic.

I recommend to everyone that they provide fake physical-address data, because there appears to be no benefit to using a real address. Domain registrars will send an email when the domain is up for renewal; if you’re certain they can email you, or if you watch the expirations yourself, then there really isn’t any reason to give a real address — so long as wrong-thinking legislators don’t make it illegal, anyway.

But, one’s email address is still exposed. Until now: Dotster, my favorite registrar, recently announced a service called Spam Shield.

Here’s how it works:

• Rather than publishing the email address you provide, they publish an address generated for you. Any mail received at this address gets forwarded to your real address…
• after it passes spam filtering.
• And then the addresses are all changed every 10 days, effectively expiring any address that has already been harvested by the spambots.

This is a service I’d pay for, but I don’t have to — at the moment, Dotster offers it for free.