Brooklands Radio website includes several email addresses – for sales, website queries, music requests etc.

Hackers scan websites and collect email addresses which they can then sell. This is annoying as it means a flood of stupid spam and scam emails and once you’re on the spammers list you cannot get off it except by deleting your email account and taking up a new one.

Brooklands Radio added some fake email addresses to the website, to judge what spam and scam messages are common and to be able to identify such messages arriving at valid email addresses.

What Fake Email Addresses Should I Create?

It depends on what business you are in. For the radio station the fake email address “purchasing_manager” did the job and attracts a lot of scam and spam messages.

We have never given that email address to anyone, so we know that anything coming into the address is going to be rubbish.

The Purpose of Fake Email Addresses

• They act as honey pots – luring scammers and spammers
• They can reduce the volume of rubbish emails going to valid email addresses
• You can monitor the scam and spam messages and learn what scammers are up to

Catchall Email Address

Some email services allow the use of a catchall email address, whereby any emails to the domain name but with an incorrect email address will be moved to the catchall email address. This makes it possible to see all incoming messages without the invalid ones clogging up valid email accounts.

The catchall email address shows clearly that spammers guess email addresses and then sell them as part of their email lists.

The creators of the spam lists either simply guess possible email address e.g. for the domain radiostatio.com they might invent accounts@ or sales@ or john.smith@ or paul@ or mary@ and so on. Then they sell these email addresses and the people who buy such poor quality email lists get ripped off paying for rubbish.

For the radio station, there’s about 30 invalid email addresses used by the spammers and scammers and floods of emails arrive at these addresses.

If your email service provider does not use a catchall address, then it is likely any messages to invalid addresses will be bounced .i.e. the recipient will get a message back saying that email account is invalid. You might think that will stop the spammer sending messages to those addresses – but they ignore such messages and carry on sending.

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