I hate spam.  I really hate spam.  I guess everybody can relate to that.  I not only hate spam, but I don’t like receiving correspondence from some website that made me register to view some content or post a message, some site that that I’ve ordered from or any other place that I’ve had to divulge some contact info in return for something that I wanted/needed.

Honestly I only ever receive spam in my work email addresses.  In the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve received a total of perhaps a dozen spam messages to my personal email address (which won’t be listed here for the most obvious of reasons).  :)  So mostly I just want to get rid of ‘legitimate spam’.  bah!

The best way I know of to ferret out those weasels that release my email address to 3rd parties is by configuring postfix to accept mail for my so-called throwaway addresses.  It’s easy to do and requires but a single parameter in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

recipient_delimiter = +

Yep, that 1 magic line is all I need to make my life easier and my inbox cleaner.   At the same time, it exposes those companies that play fast and loose with my address.

After I insert that config line, I restart postfix and that’s all there is to it.  Now when I register, for example, at the New York Times to read some stories, I can submit an email address such as:

david+nyt@example.com (example.com being replaced by my real domain of course)

I don’t need to go into my server and create a user or anything else so long as there is a ‘david’ user already there.  When my mailsever gets the reply from the New York Times to confirm my address, I’ll see that it’s To: david+nyt@example.com and it will be delivered to my david inbox.

If later I start getting spam addressed to david+nyt, then I know the source.  :)

If a single address gets out of hand and starts sending me spam, I can just go in and block that so it never gets to my eyes.  Good stuff that!