Very seriously looking at a different domain name.

The ‘inherited’ spam from the innocent days of the late nineties (back when I had my email address listed as a ‘mailto’ link on every damn page on my site) has gotten to the point where well over 65% of my incoming mail is spam.

The spam filters take care of most of it, but the simple fact of the matter is that I’m losing ‘real’ emails amongst the deluge, and there’s simply too much crap coming in to double check the filters all the time (heck, if I had time to do that, I wouldn’t need the filters).

That said, I don’t really know what I’d use for a new domain name (www.golden-god.com seems a trifle overwrought). Something with a bear in it would be nice, simply because I’d be able to continue using some of the image themes here and there, but I’m just not coming up with anything. The eponymous testerman.com has a certain appeal… the appeal of something I can’t have, actually (according to the whois).

Thoughts?

you could always play with the bear theme.

Grizzly-Cave
bear
bears-den
bears-home
bears-bed
testerbears

The bear by itself in the list was supposed to be your favorite color plus bear

There's also a few less-bearish ones, like:

falling-down.com (which requires less rewriting in some places)

Let me know for the record how incredibly irksome this is. It's like being forced to move from your own home because folks keep stabling fliers all over the outside walls, windows, and doors. Rrg.

There has to be a better way than running away. Heck, I'd recommend (or use) a positive reponse whitelist service first.

Again, rrg, and I say that as someone who would be far less inconvenienced by your having to change.

That should be, "let me say for the record." Rrg.

Don't bother if you are only doing it to dodge spam. The cold hard truth is most spam is automated now where every combination of words ever showing up on email is bombarded with crap. At most you will buy a month of relative peace. As soon as you buy anything online you are screwed again.

I really don't think a lot of my spam comes from online purchases.

Why? because it all comes to bear@bears-cave.com

When I buy something at the palm store, the email I give is palm@bears-cave.com

amazon@bears-cave.com
ebay@bears-cave.com

You get the picture -- none of the incoming mail is sent to those addresses.

could you have all of your bear@bears-cave.com email go to /dev/null, and give everyone who needs it a new email address?

Well, that's the 'master' email address for the site, so that's kind of tricky.

Why is it tricky?

The automatic spammers don't care what your actual e-mail address is. They lift your @bears-cave.com and hit every word combination their random generator can think of. After all, they are not targetting you personally...they target any e-mail address they can reach.

No matter what you change to, you'll get spam.

If you have a domain, any at all, you'll get extra spam even if you don't use it.

Why go to the trouble of changing stuff around when you can just fight the spam with some filters for the email client*

* - I get around 200-400 spams a day, 2 to 5 of them make it past my filters in a 48 hour period.

From looking at the spam about 3 months ago, I figure 75% of it comes to me because I have domains registered. Not because of mailto links in webpages, because alot of the spam seems to have come at me byway of domains I know but have no page up.

I just blogged about this today...

http://www.blue-girl.com/lalagirl/archives/000525.html

I just started using Spamhiliator, and it works pretty well!

Addressing John, the fact of the matter is that I get about 200 to 400 spams a day, and a very small percentage of them are addressed to anything other than 'bear@bears-cave.com' -- which is annoying, since if I wanted I could re-route those fake aliases to a /dev/nell address, except there aren't enough to warrant it. :(

Heck, Jackie gets almost as many as I do, and all she sees is the mail coming in specifically to honey@bears-cave.com -- that's it, and the fact that it got farmed off of the Amber TiHE pages a few years ago is enough to dump 150+ messages a day into her inbox.

Re: clovis -- yeah, I'm catching the spam and removing it -- almost nothing gets through. There are two problems with this.

a) the fact that it's coming in at all pisses me off.
b) the sheer mass of spam means that I unknowingly miss 'real mail' that gets tagged as spam incorrectly, because I can't double check the spam filters.

Problems with spam
A - Running won't stop it.
B. After looking at what I was blocking 4 or 5 times, I realized, I'm not missing anything "real". If someone sends me something that the spam filters think I don't want, chances are strong that I didn't want it anyway.

I don't know I'd go as far as Clovis on B (I've had false positives before that could have been unfortunate if I hadn't caught them), but I agree with A.

I still think a challenge/response system (e.g.) for your regular account is something to consider, if the current arrangement is not working.

Ultimately, it's like occasionally tossing legit snail-mail with the big bundle of junk mail that came in the box. False positives you miss do happen.

I think the only way my address has ever been collected is from the web, posted either plain-text or in a mailto:. A few years ago, I think it got collected from the domain registry a few times, but in the past year that hasn't happened.

The main address I use has been posted in plaintext on the web a couple times by people who messed up; I think that's the reason I get spam to it. Even though I vigorously defend it, playing "whack-a-mole" with nearly every spam it gets, I believe I'm not always fast enough to alert the spammer (before he sells the list to someone else) that this list is tainted with a spam-whacker, and should be discarded.

Also, my hosting company, webstrikesolutions.com, has put in server-based spam returners; I think it's something along the lines of bouncing anything that matches known spam mails without me ever even seeing it. Great stuff.

The upshot is, I get about 1 spam a day.

I think getting a new e-mail address can save you; they can be kept clean. Is there any possible way you can change the main address on your domain? Surely the people who host you will understand the need? Or you could switch to a different hosting service, that has a different "main e-mail address"; mine does.

I might change my main email address to something else.

I'll leave hostingmatters.com when they pry it from cold, dead hand, however. Never. Never never. Never. I'd rather get a new domain name entirely.

You sure you're not just looking for an excuse to get smarterthantheaveragebear.com? ;)

I hear you on the spam, though. It's definitely getting annoying. What you may want to try to do is just change your email address to something slightly different. I've been using all sorts of emails based on my domain to drop stuff out.

For instance, set up a subdomain. In mail, you can configure your subdomains to forward mail to an account or to blackhole it. If you're dropping your address somewhere that you don't ever expect or want to get mail from, throw in an address from a subdomain that's blackholed.

Conversely, set up bogus accounts that you can easily filter out. For example, sign up for PayPal with paypal@bears-cave.com and filter to trash any email to that address that's not from the paypal.com domain.

Another thing I do is have mail to any random set of addresses filtered into a folder that I periodically check for false positives. In most cases, nothing's legitimate.

You could change your personal address and give it to people but not post it anywhere. Your chance of exposure is reduced significantly and is only an issue if your friends post your email somewhere that's accessible by harvesters.

So, just for kicks, maybe I'll grab i@spank.it and pass that around.

Or not.