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One of the ways I like love to combat spam is by using email aliases. Basically I have one real email address that I do not give out to people but that I use to check my email with my provider. Then what I do is create any number of virtual or alias email addresses in my provider’s admin interface. So the scenario is that everytime I need to provide an email address for membership or to interact with a company I create a new email address (alias) for them and then give them that address. The beauty is that I only have to check one address and all my mail from all of those alias addresses gets sent to it automatically.

So if I ever get spam then I know exactly where it’s come from because each company / person has their own email address alias. It’s easy to stop them too, just delete the alias and no more spam! Not only that but the company or person who either spammed or allowed you to be spammed has just lost some credibility with you.

I got a Lloyds TSB phishing email this morning. I expect that you know what phishing emails are all about. I wasn’t fooled for an instant but I was interested in how they expected to trick people. The contents of the email were poorly coded HTML with images that were sourced from the lloydstsb.com site itself and an ugly link that blatantly was not kosher.

The email was sent to ‘undisclosed recipients’ a flaw in my plan you might think, not a problem, a quick look at the headers revealed that the email was sent to underu@mydomain.co.uk (I like to use aliases that are the company names themselves). This was the email alias I set up for www.underu.com the underwear site for men, when I shopped with them in the past.

I don’t know how my email address got from them to the attacker and I’m away from home at the moment. When I get back I’ll be in touch with UnderU and ask how my email address and who knows what other information could of been abused. I’ll update the post if / when they respond.