[MLB-WIRELESS] Email address format of online mail archives

[Rowan 2008]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Craig Sanders wrote:

> hiding your address doesn't work.  good spam-filtering can work.

I'm working in the opposite direction to you, I think that prevention is 
better than cure. Rather than try to block spam (and probably a handful of 
false positives) I decided to avoid getting myself "indexed" in the first 
place. I retired my 10 year old address in 2006 (which is still littered 
all over the web), and since then I've actually had some success with the 
(unfiltered) username+currentyear format that I'm using to write this msg 
- I receive roughly 30-40 spams per day to my 2006 and 2007 variations 
(which include a bunch of admin addresses on various domains), so it was 
disappointing to see the 2008 variation receiving spam so soon after I 
started using it.

I've also set up a simple script that blocks IPs that attempt to deliver 
to unknown email addresses for 24 hours - most of them have words such as 
dialup, pool, adsl etc in their hostnames so it's likely they're botnet 
zombies. Sounds a bit like closing the gate after the horse has bolted, 
but it's more like closing the gate after the first horse of 10 has made 
it out. :) As a bonus it fairly quickly blocks a dictionary attack. The 
block list usually floats around 1500-2000 IPs.

If I can figure out how, my next step will be to generate a unique email 
address for each outbound message, with a whitelist for certain domains 
such as wireless.org.au which will only accept a static address.

Cheers.