I run my own email server. I’m still convinced this is a good idea for a die-hard geek like myself, but it does have some downsides. For instance, I have an additional layer of complexity to deal with when fighting spam.

One weapon in my arsenal of spam-fighting techniques is the daily throw-away email address, as seen in the upper-right corner of this website. It works pretty well, all things considered. Only twice have I received spam at an active daily alias. (You almost have to admire the nimble little spammers. And by “admire” I mean “eviscerate.”)

Letting the address harvesters gather those throw-away aliases, however, comes at a cost. For every message a spammer sends to a now-outdated alias, my server then has to try to successfully bounce that message to sender. Since the vast majority of sender data is faked, you end up with a double-bounce scenario where the attempt to bounce a message bounces back to the postmaster of the domain the spam was being sent to.

Yep. I get to see the spam anyway, except now it’s buried inside of “delivery failure” notices. How nice. As a for-instance, I can go to bed at 11pm right after checking email for the night, wake up at 8am and find upwards of 50 emails titled “Failure Notice” in my inbox.

Some of you are probably way ahead of me on this one. “Gee,” I realized this morning, “Why don’t I just create a new administrative email account and change the ‘postmaster’ alias to point to that instead of to my real email address?” (The cleverer geeks among you will be wondering why I ever pointed ‘postmaster’ to my main personal account instead of going this route in the first place. Oh, how I wish I had a good answer for you…)

And so I have done. The difference is positively astounding. I’ve increasingly been in the habit over the last few months of checking my inbox compulsively because I knew that with every click there would be a new “failure” or two or three to erase while I waited for real mail to show up.

The only email I now receive is actually addressed directly to my email account. Some of it is still spam, but almost all of that is tagged by SpamAssassin at the server level and filtered accordingly by my mail client. I’m overjoyed by the lack of tedium involved in checking my email!

All I have to do now is break my compulsive mail-checking habit. That, and convince people to actually send me email…