Test 1 - Catch-all email address.
Giving your site a catch-all address can sometimes seem like a good idea. Tell grandma your address is grandmaslittlegirl@troublemaps.com and it makes her happy. Tell shifty website mailing list owner your address is shiftylistcom@troublemaps.com. Then if you ever get spam and the header information shows it was sent to that address you know who sent it!
This special email address will automatically accept any email sent to any letter combination on your domain. If grandma accidentally sends email to grandmaslittleboy@troublemaps.com her email will still be delivered. ANY email sent to any address on your site gets delivered. The bottom line is, you have a virtually unlimited number of email addresses at your disposal. Sooner or later some spammers will send mail to dozens (or hundreds) of random address on your domain. This will greatly multiply the amount of spam you get.
This brings me to my first test. I just registered this domain a few hours ago. It is December 2, 2006. Let’s see how long it takes for me to get spam with these rules:
- I will not tell anyone about my domain name or email address.
- I will simply turn on my catchall account and let the spam come in.
Keep in mind that the only way for these spammers to find my new domain name is to scour whois engines looking for new domains. They are that desperate.
2006-12-19 Update: No spam yet.
- I am making the site public to see how long it takes for web page email scrapers to start sending the spam.