/ Don 6 Comments

Spam-blocking sub-domains

A long time ago, around the time I started compiling my “Best Practices…” list, I began creating forwarders for ecommerce accounts to distinguish who was sending me solicitations and to be able to stop them easily. If you give someone your email address, say “joe@joe-co.com” then you have no idea where the soliciations are coming from and the only way to stop them is to increase your SpamAssassin rating—potentially losing false positives—or to get a new email address.

But, if you create “hsbc@joe-co.com,” and forward that to “joe@joe-co.com,” you can see who sold your email address and promptly disrupt the flow of spam by simply deleting the forwarder. Well, after a decade of online business through my company, ERA404, I have a veritable bee’s hive of forwarders floating around. And, as I’d like to do some house-keeping to keep them organized, I’ve decided to create a sub-domain to create easily visual recognition of what is an actual forwarder (i.e., don@ forwards to don.citarella@) and what is a spam-blocking forwarder (i.e., hsbc@ temporarily forwards to don.citarella@).

Here’s where I need your assistance. Fill in the blank:
Solicitor: “Sir, in order for me to process your order, you need to provide a valid email address.”
Me: So I’d like to provide them with: “[solicitor name]@_____.era404.com” where ______ is the word I’m seeking.

Here are a few that I thought of: @firewall, @temporary, @spam, @commerce, @solicitations, @junkmail, @junk, @delete, @block, @protect, @safe, @safety, @protection, @temp.

Here are a few suggestions by friends: @refuse, @trash, @scrap, @waste, and my personal favorite, @is-a-dirty-dirty-whore. (Imagine providing the following: “The email address is: hsbc@is-a-dirty-dirty-whore.joe-co.com“). Ah, it’s the little things in life. It truly is.

So I appeal to you, gentle readers. What would be the best spam-blocking sub-domain? While my preference is to go with @solicitations, I worry it will be too long: networksolutions@solicitations.joe-co.com. And does @trash have that certain je ne sais quoi that I want, so that solicitors think “I see what you did there. Well played, dear sir. Well played.“?

/ Don 1 Comment

Random Musings I

Over the last few weeks, at odd hours, I was thinking of a few things that I couldn’t quite categorize into a blog post, but wanted to get out of my head. SO I think 2010 will be the year that I begin a subcategory of  Miscellaneous called Math.Random(). These will probably contain design-related thoughts, questions and micro-rants, as well as images of products, signage and brands that I felt were worth mentioning, but not weighty enough to merit their own post. Get a Tumblr, I’m sure you’re saying. And, you’re probably right. I have a Posterous (now defunct) account as well as a FFFFound (also defunct) and Dropular (yep, defunct as well) account, but I just can’t see myself committing enough time to using them regularly. I’m sure, others find them useful, but to me, it’s just one more thing. Y’know? Anyway, on with it.

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/ Don 1 Comment

tr.im returns

I was sad to see that tr.im was shut down, quite unprofessionally, back in early August. And since then, the world moved on without them and everyone forgot they ever existed in the first place. In fact, if it wasn’t for a random twitter post by them yesterday, I would’ve never learned that they apologized:

Everyone involved at Nambu would like to apologize again for the hastiness in which we acted last Sunday, announcing the shutdown of tr.im by the end of the year.

…they regrouped, and are now transitioning to being open source and community-owned.

…and you have Eric Woodward‘s personal guarantee that he’ll take care of shortfalls in funding to ensure that tr.im never goes offline again.