I have never had trouble with getting spam for any of my email accounts. I don’t know why, I just never have. I never sign up for anything fishy online. I never publish my email address online. I guess spammers just don’t know my email address exists (I have several email addresses).
But now I am in the process of setting up spam filtering on my email server because other email accounts on the server are getting lots of spam. The problem is I have no real way of judging how effective it is because I don’t get any spam.
So I set up an email account at emailtest@anideaweb.com that I am publishing every place I can think of. I have already used emailtest@anideaweb.com to sign up for several free ipod schemes. And I am publishing emailtest@anideaweb.com here on the internet for all the spam bots in the world to see and enjoy.
Please, Mr. Spammer, send some email to emailtest@anideaweb.com. I would love to here all about all the special offers I could get. I would love to help you collect your relative’s inheritance since you are stuck in Africa and can’t come here to claim it. I’m not really interested in anything dirty, but I would sincerely appreciate your thinking of me in your offerings. Please, send email to emailtest@anideaweb.com. I am waiting for you.
UPDATE One note about this, if you try something similar, don’t give out a real phone number. I have been doing this for all of 15 minutes and I have already gotten my first call. Fortunately, I gave my google voice number so I can flag it as spam (though I guess it technically isn’t spam since I gave it to them).
UPDATE #2 (6/16/09) I got 44 spam emails yesterday (up from 24 the first day). Today isn’t even half over and I am up to 33. This is awesome! Now, if I could just get Postfix to communicate properly with amavisd-new…