That’s so brilliant I think I may have to copy it!
What hosting services do you guys recommend? I’ve found a few like 1&1 but they only give 5 email boxes with the domain name, without my upgrading to a full fledged web hosting service.
I used to do this. Lately I’ve been rather lax.
You just need to look for a host that offers ‘catch-all forwarding’. I don’t know if Fasthosts will accept non-UK customers but they have no problems forwarding my email to a .com email account.
Not necessarily. I haven’t used a catch-all for quite a while, because it will catch-all things like dictionary spam and other floods.
What you want is a host that will let you set up as many individual POP/IMAP accounts as you need - probably no more than 5 unless you’re sharing with family or friends - but has generous forwarder privileges. You have only one personal email account, which real user name you guard jealously and never, ever give out to a public source, and then create forwarders by the bucketload to use for account signups, registration, and all that exposed stuff. You might even have a few for friends who aren’t as careful about such things.
You can change, redirect or black-hole forwarders with ease, but all user-name spam such as dictionary or address-book name spam will automatically blackhole itself, without a catch-all.
I don’t get it. 
I do this too, except I use a common prefix for all such names, like aaaa-theircompanyname@example.com. Then I can set up spam filter rules like
- It’s not spam if it’s for spacevegetable@example.com.
- Otherwise, it’s spam if it’s for aaaa-evilcompany@example.com
- Otherwise, it’s not spam if it’s for aaaa-*@example.com (where the * wildcard matches any text).
- Otherwise it’s spam.
I add to rule 2 whenever some company abuses the custom address I gave them and sends me spam with it. (That’s only happened 2-3 times out of perhaps 100 custom addresses I’ve given out over many years.)
And rule 4 eliminates the spam problem caused by catch-all addresses. Spammers have never randomly tried aaaa-anything, just simple names like jsmith or sam. (The prefix I use isn’t really aaaa.)
Note that I don’t have to change my configuration at all when I assign a new aaaa- address, unlike some options using forwarders. I only change that when some company proves itself untrustworthy by distributing my address to spammers.
(This has worked pretty well. But once I tried to order from a company that told me I couldn’t use aaaa-theircompanyname@example.com as my email address for them, because their company name was trademarked! Reasoning with the rep didn’t help, so I just abbreviated their name. I was ordering replacement parts for a product I already owned, so I couldn’t just switch to a less stupid vendor.)
OK, since Quartz gave an answer overseas (for me), can I ask: “Where?” (particularly the ‘way under’ part).
Search “web hosting” and look for one that gives better email hosting than (necessarily) web services. There are hundreds. I’ve had tremendously good luck with WebQuarry, which has a full hosting suite for about $8/month. There are cheaper ones, especially if you bundle your domain registration with the hosting. (I prefer to keep my registrations at one consolidated location and my hosting on an as-suits basis, but for one-to-one use combining them is fine.
WebQuarry will register your domain free for a prepaid year. Many such deals exist.
Stefon is a character played by Bill Hader on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment. The news anchor Seth Meyers will bring Stefon on to give viewers advice on what to do in NYC on various holidays. Trouble is Stefon is a very strange hypersexual dude who instead of recommending family-friendly places will say something like “New York’s hottest club is ‘GUSSSSSSSSSSH!’” and proceed to describe all the weird stuff the club has.
Here are some links: The Top 5 Stefon Sketches Ever | HuffPost Entertainment
Not to mention, if some spammer spoofs your site as the “from” address, you’ll get hit with thousands of bounces and/or angry replies. That happened to me with a domain I owned: everything to an unknown address got forwarded to my personal email - I was getting one every couple of seconds until I got it turned off.
Most likely your hosting provider just actively fight against spammers. In recent years, there is no perfect way to distinguish spam from relevant letters.