Use a different email alias for every company you deal with.

I got a email from a chap in dell telling me of a 10% offer on notebooks. This was strange as I had not given them permission to send me promotional emails. To make matters worse me email address and those of 486 other people were in the ‘to’ field. About a half an hour later I got “—–, —– would like to recall the message, “— — — — — — — —“. Then two hours later the message was sent again this time using the BCC field.

So he made a mistake and tried to do a recall but that only works in the Microsoft Exchange world. My biggest problem is that he used and had access to my email address even though I did not opt in for any mailings apart form my order. Spammers could potentially use my email address but I’m not that worried about it as I always use different email addresses for every company I deal with. That way I know which company sold my email to spammers or have bad security and their address list got stolen.

Originally I had everything that prefixes my domain name coming to one account but now I make an alias for each address I use. That way company@example.com gets redirected to my real account me@example.com. Anything not for a valid email account or a redirect just gets dropped into a spam folder. I check through this now and again just checking the receiver address to see if it’s something I missed.