53,000,000 e-mails.  Amounts to about 1/6 the population the United States.  Now I can’t imagine every one of those being valid.  I will confess that on occasions where I was pressed for an e-mail address, I simply made one up for the sake of moving right along without arguing with the cashier.

There are occasions where I simply can’t get away with posting bogus data.  Let’s say with Amazon, Google, Facebook, the e-mail address is an important part of your identity, and in many cases, my actual login ID.  What if one of the big guys gets hacked, or an unscrupulous employee collects and sells the data and retires in southern Snoozebeckistan?  The is a preventative measure.

I own my own domain.  Your sitting here and reading it.  No one knows of any specific e-mail address for me. One of the perks of owning my own domain is a have total control over the email addresses on my server.  I have an e-mail for each service I subscribe too, such as f@timothylegg.com for Facebook or g@timothylegg.com for all things Google.  These addresses simply alias and to a common local address that I receive mail from directly.

So yeah, some place that verifies over e-mail before creating an account, I create a special address just for them and have it delivered to my inbox.  Sometimes you find out who got hacked or sells out when I start getting Canadian Pharmacy or Russian Singles emails and that’s a bonus.  To fix it,  just rename the e-mail address and let them try to get it again.

Going wide with your e-mail addresses is the best spam filter.  They have to find it, and then after that, send me enough junk mail to where it’s worth changing my address.  I typically change my address every three or four years and have been quite fortunate.  In all of 2014, I have only gotten about 15 spam messages.

You want to send me a message on e-mail, just go to my website and look it up.  It’s current and fresh.  You know where to find me.