Ditch Your Old E-mail Addresses
Found on Wired on Friday, 14 November 2008
Times have changed, and that old address is a black hole for spam. You never check it, and you don't want to. But your stupid ISP, your stubborn family members and high school buddies insist on sending you important things there.
Once you've got a domain, set up your mail preferences so that every e-mail sent to the domain gets accepted.
On your new domain hosting service, redirect your *@[yourdomain.com] to your Gmail account.
Use the "Vacation reply" in Gmail (activate it in Gmail's Settings tab) to announce to each sender your new address.
This is the worst suggestion and how-to I've read for quite some time. First of all, do not use GMail, unless you want to entrust your whole online life to a company which is known for being notoriously greedy for data and has a bad habit of not respecting privacy. Also, do not use a wildcard/nobody/catch-all setup. As soon as a spammer uses your domain to fake the sender (and it will happen), you'll end up with thousands of bounces; and together with your vacation reply, GMail will happily pump out replies to all those, letting world and dog know that you accept everything. Plus, if a spammer gets one of those, he knows your new valid address. Prepare for more spam. If you decide to set up your own mailserver as the article also suggests, don't be an idiot and use it to forward everything only. Set up POP3/IMAP properly and use your favorite mail client. Or if it has to be Windows, get a good and free solution, like SmarterMail.