Not as Sneaky as I Thought

So I have been using Sneakemail in order to keep from getting spammed so hard via places where my email address is public. That’s why I have a sneakemail.com address at the bottom of this weblog. I’ve also been using them for my return address on Usenet postings. My original plan was to create them as month specific, and every month create a new one, and decommision the ones older than three or four months. This way someone could email me from the post for a while, but not forever. By the time the address was harvested and propagated through the spam channels, I would have already turned it off.

That was the theory. In practice, I got lazy and undisciplined and hadn’t created a new Usenet address since May. I logged in today to create a new one and to my suprise and shock, found that my account was over the 10 Meg monthly bandwidth. By digging, I found that was because of one of those viruses, getting sent over and over at 300K apiece. Presumably this was from one of the “harvest from newsgroups” ones. Now I have a dilemma. At this moment, mailing to any of them will bounce with an “over quota” error. I could look for another solution or I could let it hang for a while and eventually come back on. Try as I might, I can’t find anything on the sneakemail site to give me a clue about when the dates run. Is it the calendar month, does everyone have a different start day or what? I don’t really expect any help from them, since the free service is a loss leader to get people to pop $2/month for their service anyway. Since I have my own box that I rent and control, surely I could set up something similar, perhaps with rotating DynDNS hostnames or something. I suppose I could always do this the hard way myself, just creating and destroying mailboxes on one of the hosted domains I control. Is there a better way?

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.