DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I set up my first email server, and created an email address at my own domain in late 1996. I used that address as my primary personal email address for six years, sending over 47,000 emails and receiving probably five times that.

Years ago, before spam accounted for 40% of all commercial email*, I used that address to subscribe to a few mailing lists. This is probably how the spammers got their tainted hands on it — because the mailing lists published web archives of list traffic without obfuscating posters’ addresses. In other words, the owners of those mailing lists published my email address on the web. (You can find out if this has happened to you by doing a web search for your email address. If even 1 page comes up, spambots will eventually find and harvest your address.)

As of late 2002, spamming has become commonplace. I receive 10-20 spam messages per day. That may not sound like much, but I have extreme countermeasures in place, and I’ve been using disposable addresses extensively for two years.

But I loathe spam and I have no more time to spend deleting it. The easiest answer was to retire my primary email address. As much as I hate to sacrifice my address as a victim of the war against spam, I look forward to a spam-free inbox. And I’m curious to see how long it will last!

The only remaining open vector of address dissemination, short of my own personal carelessness (e.g. subscribing to a mailing list without first generating a disposable address), is through friends who share my address indiscriminately. Maybe someone will send me an e-card from a website that, in the throes of financial distress, will collect and sell email adresses entered by users. That would suck.

My old address will work for another week or two, and after that will begin issuing auto-replies containing the day’s disposable address. Anyone who reads their bounce messages will therefore be able to find me.

Oh, if you’re about to email me to advocate email filtering, e.g. to tell me that I should have just installed SpamAssassin rather than changing my email address, you need not make the effort. I approve of filtering, but at this time I would rather block spam at the server level, than accept it for filtering.

*Anti-spam software vendor Brightmail calculates and publishes this statistic. Their figure for August was 36%, according to this WSJ article: For Bulk E-Mailer, Pestering Millions Offers Path to Profit.