Inbox Cleaning: Please learn to pass a Turing test.

[bluesbodger]

As you may know, I own the domain name bodger.org. I use it for both that there website and for my main email account.

As you may also know, one great thing about controlling the domain name for your email is that you make up your usernames at will. I've told many friends that they can send email to "anything you like at bodger dot org," and I will see it. Sure enough, I routinely get messages for "chris," "chrisb," "bodger," "bluesbodger", "telapathicmonkeys," "TheExpectedValue," and, yes, "anythingyoulike."

The trouble with this system is that anybody else can also make up usernames for you, which makes it very, very easy for someone to guess a valid email address, which means I get a mind-boggling amount of spam. I delete about 150 or 200 messages per day while checking my mail, and I let somewhere between 500 and 1000 messages per day languish in the Junk box so I can search through them when I think I'm missing something important. Many of these are addressed to "webmaster," "admin," "sales," and other such names you'd expect a standard corporate domain to have. Not all of them, though: Right now I have 168 messages, all received in the last month, addressed to "bepretty at bodger dot org," an address that was entirely fabricated by spambots. I have never used it for anything nor told anyone it's my address .

To fight the torrent, I'm adopting a more aggressive mail filtering rule, and it's no longer strictly true that I'll see absolutely anything you send to bodger.org. Here's the new skinny:

• If I have your name in my address book, you're on the whitelist and theoretically you needn't worry about any of this.
• If you want to send me email, send it to [anything reasonable that doesn't sound like an obvious spam magnet] at bodger dot org.
• Specifically, if you set [anything reasonable that doesn't sound like an obvious spam magnet] to any of the following spammy values, my mail scripts will delete it before I even know it exists:
  • 000393b2f48e
  • 20driving
  • accounting
  • advertising
  • bepretty
  • billing
  • cruzlazbodgersen
  • gonochoristic
  • hecbodgerdiv
  • lazbodgersen
  • legbodgerdob
  • majordomo
  • odgerweb
  • oristic
  • sales
  • squamariaceae.gonochoristic
  • tarentine
  • tgonochoristic
  • uucp
• If you set [anything reasonable that etc.] to any of the following generic usernames, your message will go to a folder which I'll ignore for a long time, skim through very fast, probably miss your message, and eventually delete everything:
  • admin
  • webmaster
  • bodgerweb
  • help
  • home
  • info
  • mail
  • support
• I may, and probably will, add other usernames to these lists if they're attracting spam and nobody's using them for real messages.
• No matter what address you use, if you send me anything with a subject line of "Vigara cilasis chepe $3/pillule" or "i Want sale you Rolex. u want one?" it will either be filtered into the spam box and I'll never see it, or I will see it and delete it and resolve to never speak with you again.

I want to read messages from you, but not from spambots. Both you and the spambots know that email addresses look like user@domain, and both you and the spambots know that my domain is bodger.org. You can get a leg up on them by also knowing that my name is Chris.