You need a virus protection program. Don’t try and solve the virus problem with a spam filter.
Also I think your analogy is bad. In the context of mail throwing out a good email is putting the innocent to death, and spam getting through is allowing the guilty to walk free.
I’m curious as to how common this is. I own several domains, which each have less than a half-dozen email addresses associated with them. As an experiment, I created a new email address on one of them. I never posted anything to Usenet, an Internet message board, or anything similar using this address. It was only used to exchange messages with a couple of friends.
I got my first spam message to this account less than 48 hours after it was created!
Auntie Em is already whitelisted on my computer. But you’re looking at this wrong:
If a valid message gets zapped, I may have just lost a contract, author appearance, book signing gig, or something similar that could have made me thousands of dollars.
If a virus gets through, big deal. I’ve received thousands of virus emails over the years (I write about hackers, and have often called virus authors “scum,” so I’m a target). I have never been infected by a virus because I don’t use Microsoft email tools, allow downloaded images, allow scripts in emails to execute, run attachments, click on links in emails, and so forth. It’s all about paying attention.
In a nutshell, then, killing valid messages is a BAD thing for business email. Allowing a few spams or viruses through is no big deal when you have intelligent and well-informed people running the computer.
Obviously, the rules are very different for a large corporation where some percentage of the employees are idiots who would click on a link to a “fun game” from someone they’ve never heard of.
As a counter point, I have had various hotmail and Gmail acounts that are simply variations of my (fairly common) name. My current Gmail account gets no more than 14 spam emails a week, despite the fact that I use it almost any time I am asked for an email address. I don’t know why this is the case. It can’t possibly be my name because my mom uses the same format ([first initial][last name][numbers to make it unique]) and she gets a much more typical amount of spam.
I do not know but I wonder if the issue here is whoever is hosting your domain is selling your e-mail addresses. Somehow, someway someone got your new e-mail address out there and into the hands of spammers. I suppose a spammer might just try to throw mail at random addresses but that seems inefficient.
My home account is via SBC and I am guessing they will not sell my e-mail address to outside sources (I never checked to see what their policy is on this). But I can say I have gotten close to zero spam mails in 3 years (I know I said zero before but on thinking about it I think I have gotten a few but it is very, very low…like less than 10 in three years).
I doubt it, because I’d be getting a much higher volume of spam if they were doing that.
I set up a “catchall” email account, which receives all email directed to invalid email addresses at one of my domains. I checked to see what it caught. There was a lot of spam mail sent to admin@invisiblewombat.com[sup]1[/sup], webmaster@invisiblewombat.com, postmaster@invisiblewombat.com, and other fairly obvious addresses which have never existed for this domain. There were also several spams addressed to bill@invisiblewombat.com (there’s never been a “Bill” here) and a whole lot of “one-off” addresses that looked like likely guesses. I know they aren’t old leftover addresses, because I’m the only one that’s ever owned the domain I used for this experiment, and I’ve had it for nine years.
With Tyr’s system of picking email addresses, they’re not likely guesses. I think, however, that a large number of domains out there are likely to have an “admin” or a “bill.” Since the email address I was using was my first name (not an uncommon name), I think it likely that it was just a random guess.
[sup]1[/sup] No, invisiblewombat.com not my real domain.