Give out custom or disposable addresses at will

--VQ-- · Site Admin Joined: 06 Jan 2003 Posts: 476

Internet domain names sell for as little as $4/year. If you own a personal domain (e.g. "davisfamily.com"), the Vanquish List-Server List offers a surprisingly powerful benefit: You can give out privileged or disposable addresses.

Example #1: Disposable address
A rebate form requests your email address. You would like to give them an address, in case there is a problem with the rebate, but you are afraid of receiving irrelevant marketing mail after the rebate has been issued.
Example #2: Privileged address
You are speaking at a convention. You would like anyone in the audience to reach you without the delay and hassle of an address confirmation. Essentially you want to white list all of them, regardless of their separate (and unknown) "From" addresses.

In either case, you simply make up a custom address (for example, "tuesday-lunch@davisfamily.com"). This custom "To" address admits mail from any address, just as if they had a special password - even if you do not know the sender's address and had not previously written to them. This technique is sometimes referred to as a "disposable address", but with Vanquish, no maintenance is required. The creation and deletion of sender addresses is trivial.

Suppose that you own the domain "marcasite.com" and that you have three existing mailboxes: steve@marcasite.com, sales@marcasite.com, pam@marcasite.com

Whenever you give an address to a new business contact - let's say to your landlord, Eastern Properties - give them a customized address: EasternProperties@marcasite.com. Create and forward the new address from your domain control page and add this custom address to your Vanquish Allow List as a "List-Serve" entry. Unlike a regular Allow List entry which admits messages from EasternProperties, you have gone one better... You are admitting mail written *TO* EasternProperties@Marcasite.com. This has two distinct advantages:

Employees of Eastham Properties can send to you from anywhere, even if they are using a different "From" address.
Spammers claiming to be at Eastham Properties will not get access to your mail box, because they don't know the special "TO" address that is used by Eastham.

The trick is to create an email "alias" to your own address for any sender that may dispurse your address to separate senders. For example, suppose that you regularly buy Dell computers. You receive email from various departments at Dell (sales, service, returns, rebates, etc). You don't know the email addresses of everyone who might send to you, but you don't want to challenge a discount coupon or your own rebate confirmation. In the past, you added Dell.com to your Domain Allow list, but spammers often claim to send from popular domains...

Instead, give Dell or any company with with whom you do business a custom email address: Dell@Marcasite.com. You must also set up an email alias at the console of your email hosting provider. Create the alias Dell = Steve. You needn't check a new mailbox, because mail to Dell@Marcasite.com is directed to your existing address, Steve@Marcasite.com. Viola! You will get mail from anyone that has access to your Dell registration, even if they write to you from a personal account. It is not the fact that they are writing from Dell.com that grants them access to your mailbox, but rather that they write to the customized address Dell@Marcasite.com. Of course, if the address is ever disseminated to spammers or if you terminate your relatiohship with Dell, you can always delete the address from your email domain and your List-Serve list. You will still continue to get mail from anyone at Dell with whom you have previously corresponded.

Note: Never forward a catchall address from your own domain. Instead, create the individual addresses that you add to your List-server List. See our policy on catchall addresses.