Sebastian Schulze has an interesting post on handling email To and From addresses. His procedure when supplying an Email address to, say, a Website such as some-site.com is to specify some-site.com@his-domain.com where his-domain.com is his domain. That allows him to apply appropriate filters and discover the source of spam.
In order for this to work, he needs two things:
- His email provider must pass all email to him regardless of the user name.
- He has to set the
Fromaddress on any replies tosome-site.com@his-domain.com.
The first item is generally doable if you have control of your domain, especially if you run your own email server. The second is a lot harder with almost every email client. Fortunately Schulze uses mu4e so it’s relatively easy with a bit of Elisp.
Actually, mu4e can almost handle this out-of-the-box. You can specify your email addresses and mu4e will respond with the appropriate From address. Schulze’s situation is a little more complicated. You could do it with vanilla mu4e but you’d have to constantly housekeep your mu4e configuration. Schulze’s solution takes care of everything automatically.
The Elisp required is minimal so it’s an easy solution providing you have your own domain and are using mu4e. My own—not as good—solution is to add specific “possibly spam” addresses to my mail server and use that for sites that are possible sources of spam. Schulze’s solution is clearly superior and worth emulating if you can.