email

Forgive my clickbait title, but everyone and their dog has this one rule you must follow to avoid scams and spam … or some variation of it. Maybe it’s a top-ten list or something. They’re all valuable, to some extent, and yet every day people are duped. And now that scams are being written by AI, you can’t even count on spotting scams with broken English (or whatever your language is) and poor grammar.

But every time I read about the latest data breach I think to myself, “Thank god they don’t have my email address or phone number.” Wait, what?! How do I open accounts without giving that information?! Oh, I do, but it’s not the one email address and phone number that 99.99999% of the world give out. For that reason as well no connection can be made between accounts because each account has a different email address!

For many years I’ve operated a system of what I call “supplier addresses”. If I’m dealing with Twitter, for example — not that I use their name because they were mentioned in recent news about a data leak — I create the email address “twitter@mydomain.com”, and I only give that address to Twitter, nobody else. (I can do this, of course, because I own my own domain and use it to its potential. Here’s a clue: Stop using Gmail for everything and register your own domain!) Yes, I have the email address craig@mydomain.com (umm, that’s not the real email address, in case you’re stupid), but the only people who get that email address are my family (the ones I talk to, anyway) and friends. Nobody else on the planet gets that address, and I certainly don’t enter it into a form field on a web page and I don’t post it on the Web! This is why it drove me nuts, back in the 20th century, when people sent jokes out to everyone they knew and exposed all the email addresses in the “to” and “cc” fields! Some people still do that!

So if Twitter (in this example) sells my email address or is hacked, I know exactly who let my email address into the wild. To be frank, that hasn’t happened to me many times, but I quickly realised that it does happen, so the email addresses I create now all include a number (e.g., twitter123@mydomain.com). If the email address is compromised I just change the number and inform Twitter by changing it in my account with them and kill the old address. My numbering follows a system, but you can make your own rules.

I also use a system of rotating email addresses that change every month. I use those addresses for short-term relationships, like when you have to provide an email address to download some white paper or connect to free wifi or something like that. No problem, bud, have this address. If it does get spammed, it will only be for a few weeks, but the reality is that I almost never receive any spam that I don’t expect on those addresses because they don’t last long enough for spammers to sell, circulate and use.

For the last couple of years I’ve been doing the same with phone numbers. Well, almost the same, as I can’t create ad hoc telephone numbers on my domain. (I’m aware of ENUM, but I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about it as I’d like to be and society isn’t ready yet for phone numbers that look like 12345@mydomain.com.) I first started using VoIP (long term) in 2011 (if I remember correctly), but only in 2022 did I switch to a company where I have full control over setting up new phone numbers in multiple geographic locations as and when I please. Now I don’t give out my personal phone number to anyone except the aforementioned family and friends, I give out one of my junk phone numbers. (Actually, I make one other exception, for medical contacts.)

Do I still receive spam and attempts to scam me? OMG, of course I do! But my email and phone are not beeping every five seconds with a new one, and none of my thousands of grandchildren have called me to ask for bail money. In fact, because of my system I hardly ever have to deal with either. I know that if the email address I first used to register a domain in 1996 (now owned by AOL) was active I’d be inundated! But it doesn’t so I’m not. 🙂

There you go, my “one weird trick” that everyone can and should use to avoid spam email and scam phone calls. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a more comprehensive document on all the actions I’ve taken over the years and the nuances to protect myself. Here’s a hint though: It’s work, but it’s simple, and it’s way less work and aggro than deleting all the spam from your email and voice-mail accounts.