give a single recipient a domain and deliver email to any address
within that domain to the user. If anyaddress(_at_)personaldomain(_dot_)name
is
valid, the user quickly becomes trained to reject any incoming
messages that aren't part of a known context. At the same time, the
recipient can use the context provided on all messages accepted to
get visibility into how the sender obtained permission to communicate
with them.
This is an often-used technique, and it works well so long as you
don't have unrealistic expectations. I registered johnlevine.com five
years ago and ever since then I've been using blah(_at_)johnlevine(_dot_)com
addresses whenever I sign up on a web site for something.
For my other users who are less vain than I am, I've done per user
subdomains, so mail to blah(_at_)user(_dot_)iecc(_dot_)com turns into
user-blah(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com which qmail handles via its normal subaddress
mechanism. This was really easy, one line of wildcard DNS and about
two lines of mail script to translate the addresses.
This scheme has a variety of advantages. When I sign up at a place
like nytimes.com that sends newsletters, I can route the newsletters
directly to an appropriate mailbox. When I get mail from other
places, if the recipient address matches the sender, I have a strong
indication that it's legit. (Often I think it's spam, then I see the
address and I remember why it's OK.) If they don't match, I know who
leaked it. If an address gets a lot of spam, I can turn it off or
reroute it to the spamtrap.
I don't find per user addresses useful for individual correspondents.
Partly that's because there's no reasonable way to tell each
correspondent to use a separate address, partly it's because
individual correspondents rarely leak addresses to spammers. (They
may get viruses, but that's a separate problem.)
There have been a few projects to issue and handle unique addresses
automatically. The best I know about is Reflexion,
http://www.reflexion.net/, which apparently has lots of happy users.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com
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