I just made a change to my mail system that (hopefully) will put a clamp on the last bit of spam that’s been making it through. For years — ever since I registered my domain back in 1993 — I’ve been receiving all of the mail that’s sent to any random name at queso.com that doesn’t match one of the few users that I’ve configured. This was great, for a while; for the most part, it meant when websites and companies demanded an email address from me, I could create unique ones that would both let any email they sent reach me and allow me to pinpoint the companies that sold their email address lists to spammers.

Alas, with the good came the bad, namely that over the years, many, many web users have given websites fake email addresses at my domain. (I guess queso is a pretty common word, and from the makeup of most of the addresses, it looks like most of the abusers have been Spanish-speaking.) In the past six months, unsolicited email to those fake addresses have comprised between 50 and 75 percent of all unsolicited email that hit my server, and as the number kept increasing, I realized that I needed to do something about it.

So I’ve put together a new system for registering at websites, using another (less common) domain name. I’ve also gone to most every site and mailing list that I care about, making sure that I change my registration to the new domain. And after watching my inbox for the past month to make sure I haven’t missed anything (I’m sure I have, but I’m definitely at the point of diminishing returns), it was time to flip the switch.

We’ll see if this works!