I’ve been signing up for dozens of webservices lately, and every time I give them my email address I feel a little smug.
I never worry who I give my email address to. And if I ever get spam I know exactly who sold my address. Plus I can click a button and never receive any more.
Want to know how?
The secret is a “Catch-All” email address.
A catch-all address is an inbox that receives all emails sent to a particular domain (e.g. anything@domain.com). Once you’ve set one up you can use an unlimited number of different email addresses when filling in forms online. For example, when applying for accounts at different websites you might use myspace@yourdomain.com or facebook@yourdomain.com
The beauty of this is threefold:
1) You don’t need to set up a new address before you use it - the catch-all will automatically receive anything sent to addresses ending in “@yourdomain.com”
2) If you start receiving spam emails sent to dodgywebsite@yourdomain.com you know exactly who sold your details, as you never used that particular address anywhere else.
3) Once an address has been compromised you can set up a simple rule so that anything being sent to that address is immediately deleted.
So how does one go about setting up a catch-all email address? Well you’ll need to own a domain name and you’ll need to be able to create email accounts for it. Fortunately webhosting packages with these minimal requirements are extremely cheap.Personally I use
1and1.co.uk for all my webhosting. There are other hosting providers, some may be better, some worse, but I’ve never had any problems with 1and1 so for this guide I’m recommending them.Unless you want a website or server package as well, you can simply sign up for an Instant Email package for just 69p a month. Yes, that’s 69 PENCE a month. For this you’ll get 5 email accounts with 2GB mailboxes each, virus protection, spam filters (not that you’ll need them!), auto-responders, 24/7 support and plenty more.
As well as the email package you’ll also need a domain name, which costs from as little as £1.99 a year. I spend more than that on beer every day…
Once your email package is set up and your domain name is registered you can setup your catch-all. I won’t go into tremendous detail here as step-by-step instructions are available from 1and1. Basically you just use the 1and1 Control Panel to create an email address called “*@yourdomain.com”. The asterisk acts as a wildcard, which matches any combination of letters or numbers.
That’s pretty much all there is to it. You can start using your magic new email address straight away. But there’s a couple more tricks I like to use which make this even more useful.
I’ve set up a subdomain for my catch-all. A subdomain is in the form “subdomain.yourdomain.com”. The problem with setting up a catch-all for you main domain name is that if you have a website called, for example, www.yourdomain.com, spammers will visit your site and attempt to send spam to commonly used email addresses such as mail@yourdomain.com, help@yourdomain.com, admin@yourdomain.com and so on. Obviously if you don’t have a catch-all you’ll never notice this, but using a catch-all in this case will pick up all these spam attempts. Furthermore, if the spammer doesn’t get a message back saying “This address does not exist” they’ll assume you’re receiving their spam. This is not ideal.
Thus I use the subdomain “mail.mydomain.com” for my catch-all, so all my email addresses that I hand out are in the form “anything@mail.mydomain.com”. This makes it far less likely for spambots to guess my various email addresses. Plus if I do start getting lots of spam I can simply delete the “mail” subdomain and use something else without spoiling my main domain name. The 1and1 Instant Email package comes with 5 subdomains included in the price.
My second trick is to forward my catch-all email to my Google GMail account. You can set up email forwarding from the 1and1 Control Panel at the same time as or after setting up your catch-all.
One advantage of this is that I can forward all my various email addresses, not just the catch-all, to gmail and view them all from the same account. The other advantage is that gmail has a very powerful filter system, so you can easily set up a filter to attach labels to emails coming in to a particular address, PLUS you can tell it to automatically delete emails being sent to a compromised address. This is extremely useful when using a catch-all, because as soon as you start getting spam sent to a particular address you can set it to send everything at that address into the trash - problem solved!
P.S. There are a couple of other similar ways of avoiding spam, both for free.
1) If you have a gmail account you can use email addresses in the form “yourname+anything@gmail.com” which will get sent straight to “yourname@gmail.com”. The problem with this method is that many website forms don’t accept the “+” character in email addresses, so it won’t work all the time.
2) You can use throwaway addresses at Mailinator.com. You can submit an address in the form “anything@mailinator.com”, then go to mailinator.com and login with that email address. The problem with this method is that anyone else can log in with that address, as there is no password. So if you want any privacy this is not suitable. Plus if you sign up to an important service you’ll have to remember your email address and keep signing in to check for updates and notices.
(P.S. Damn, this blog gets indexed quick. It’s been about 3 hours since I posted this article and already it’s 4th place on Google’s front page for how to automatically catch spam in gmail.)