Ask HN: How do you manage mailing list subscriptions and mitigate spam?

5 points·yourabi··4 comments

I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists (as I'm sure many do) and I of course get inundated with spam. What I've typically done is either created new email accounts once things got unbearable or recently just relied on gmail's spam filtering.

How do you manage various email accounts / mailing list subscriptions?

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Two parts to this:

1. I have a domain name that I've set up a catch-all address on it. So anythign@domain.com gets accepted and forwarded to my...

2. GMail account which has the best spam filter ever.

The process is this: when I have to give out an email address for a website, I use the website's address in the email. So if I'm sigining up to CNN, I put cnn.com@domain.com and for HN, I put news.ycombinator.com@domain.com.

This gives you two things: a. Filtering ability as the To: header is usually set to the address you've given (ironically so that it passes spam filters better).

b. Blockability in that suddenly one email starts getting a ton of spam, it's an easy block. Believe me, many well known brands have "shared" (intentionally or not) the email address I've given them, and this set up proved very handy.

This is very close to the setup I have that enabled my to determine that emusic.com has leaked my email address to spammers. I'm getting 100 emails a day from them (the spammers) and it's fortunate that my filters work.

Don't give an email address you care about to email.com.

Cross-referenced to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566825

Correction - eMusic.com

Sorry.

I do part 1 only and it works pretty well. Occasionally I have to add a site to my filter list.

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