have you got 1 email address? mwwwuuhahahaahaha. I've got billions. I mean, I've got a few. well, a few hundred. no, they're not used to send out bulk gubbins about 1-armed trouser bankers with real estate erection problem lovely 27 girl you like bulgaria pharmacy emily bronte passage v1agr4 authenticate bank proble you log in here crumpled logo snatch. they're there to stop bulk gubbins about canadian housewares pr0n one-time only special deal business card winner today only personal loan monkey botherer african dirigible implosion banknote fluttering economy bank details please little girl sad story muggings russian syndicate omega chronograph w1n!

since I was a little internet boy all I ever wanted was a domain so I spent all my pocket money on one and immediately blathered loads of meaningless crank to anybody looking for a teasmaid. but, the side-product of being your own domain oligarch is that you can have as many identities as you blummun well like so since day 1 whenever I have entered, registered, purchased, submitted, contributed, discussed, forwarded, passed on, subscribed, or otherwise provided an identity relating to an email address, I've created a unique identity. I mean, I'm still me, but the path to my door is slightly different every time. so, even though they are mostly redundant, one-off, single-use, special offer email addresses, there are a few which map to the identities I use most frequently for things like logging in to blog clients to tell people how clever I am that I have unique identities to log in to blog clients.

the benefit and the point of this is that as soon as a unique address becomes a spam target I have the opportunity to deep-six that address and start over with another, but more interestingly, I get to see exactly which of my accounts are the ones that attract the spam in the first place which raises some interesting questions about how those addresses get passed on, when they're unique to a service, community, business or organization with whom I've registered. some I might expect to get infiltrated via a careless bint on a user-created alias that's left their outlook express client wired into the nigerian backbone. some others just send corporate spam from selected partners and mostly unselected partners who have weaseled their way onto a mailing list they probably bought from a bloke down a back passage. it's the email addresses that don't have any reason to be exposed that are the interesting ones. those ones that I have used to register for a service but that are not made public. in theory, the ones that are between me and a specific company, but are used solely by that company and not shared. I know it's simply not true. and I know which companies have shared it somehow, knowingly or otherwise. and it's not necessarily the companies you might expect. most recently (i.e. today) it was the company I would least expect and like the most that has somehow let my unique email address known only to them to be shared with someone who, via atlanta.com, via phpwebhosting.com, thinks I might have a bank account with Royal Bank of Scotland AND Nat West AND National Westminter AND Abbey AND Barclays AND Yorkshire Bank and need to be aware of a security error that requires me to update my personal details for ALL of them at the same time. I mean, I've seen some convincing spam related to banking before, but this ain't it.

suffice to say, I'll be changing the email address I use with the not-aforementioned organization today, but I know at least hundreds of people who will likely get the exact same spam, but won't know how they got it and won't be able to do anything about it but will soldier on bravely with that and the other 199 spam emails a day they get to their single email address. that's just the way the internets is though hint it.

© Tim Caynes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Disclaimer: I work for Sun Microsystems, but this is nothing to do with them and it's all my fault, even though I might sometimes mention Solaris or something.