Who wants my spam?!

[shreksbro]

Hi all, I'm just wondering whether there is a particularly good email address to divert spam to?

I'm talking about situations where you are obliged to provide an email address but you know that everything which goes to it will be spam - for example, domain catchall aliases etc.

Often I just use spam @ spam.com as a forwarding address (as does half the internet according to Google), but I doubt the good folks of the Hormel Foods Corporation enjoy the extra load all that much and it's hardly an elegant solution.

I've wondered about setting a permanent forward to abuse@ whatever isp or host I'm dealing with, but I suspect this would probably win me few friends there too seeing as many of them would use that as a 'live' address for reporting issues and probably don't need a streaming feed of new spam to deal with.

I suppose I could create a hotmail address but I'd need to remember to check it regularly to keep it alive which would be a hassle, and I'd prefer to think that the spam was going immediately to somewhere that could use it constructively.

Obviously I'd like to avoid a totally fake address as presumably in certain situations bouncing would draw attention to my account from admins, and of course it may well bounce my domain info back to innocent parties in headers and who knows what they might choose to do with them.

Is there any spam-fighting agency out there that actually wants to receive my spam?! If not, what do you suggest?

[robin]

It depends on whether you have control of your own domain or not.

If so then you can simply create an e-mail address of (say) spam@domain and in the settings where you have control over your e-mail simply set that address to "fail" i.e. "no one here".

I doubt that anyone particularly wants your spam - not because there is anything wrong with it but that the people that monitor these things probably have it already....

[Eric]

Hi shreksbo & welcome to Poco Forums,

Is there any spam-fighting agency out there that actually wants to receive my spam?! If not, what do you suggest?

You could send spam to SpamCop.

Another suggestion would be to create temporary email addresses, so in case you do receive spam on them, you'll know who's sending it.

- What is Wrong With Bouncing Spam

Hope that helps.

[shreksbro]

Thanks for the replies and the welcome folks.

I have full control over a couple of domains, but a couple are managed through a reseller's control panel and I can't set it to auto-delete - the best I can do I suppose is to forward it to spam@anotherdomain and set that to delete.

I have too many email addresses to sign them all up to spamcop, and I'm not sure that automatically aggregating and forwarding all incorrectly addressed mail would be within their terms of service, even if it is essentially all spam - for example I'm not sure how the fwded email addresses (all invalid aliases @ mydomain) in the headers would be handled by their system. Also the reseller themselves might send out the odd reminder or member deal once in a while to the default address, and anyone who mis-spells a genuine alias would also result in a technical violation of the spamcop agreement as it wouldn't be spam in the most accurate sense.

Regarding temporary email addresses, I already do this to some extent and have got my spam down to tolerable levels - what I'm really looking for is a good 'dump' address to forward contaminated mailboxes and mandatory 'catchall' aliases to.

I guess the simplest solution is just to create a spam@ alias on one of my domains, and delete everything that hits it. I was just hoping that someone somewhere might want huge amounts of junk mail in order to detect trends etc, where the system itself would be able to ignore the occasional false positive by sheer lack of volume. It seems a shame to delete it all when presumably the stats could be used to help target the perpetrators in 'real time'.

In the lack of other options though I guess that's what I'll do!

Cheers and thanks again,
SB