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Spam, Email, and Wormholes…Oh My!
By DaveM | December 18, 2006
Have you ever heard of a wormhole? No, not the ones in the ground where worms live, and not the ones that transport you to the other side of the galaxy. Or are those blackholes? Uh, it doesn’t matter.
No, I’m talking about email wormholes. The kind that let you receive email from anyone for a predefined period of time and then…POOF! They disappear; never to accept another piece of email ever again. I guess that’s sort of like a wormhole (blackhole?) in outer space. You have a certain amount of time to get in and get out, or you’ll be collapsed into nothingness — never to be seen again!
You probably think I’m completely nuts and talking total gibberish right now. If I would have read the above two paragraphs prior to last night, I would have been right there with ya’!
But here’s the deal… Spam (junk email) is a huge problem for me with this domain (Mauder.com). So you can imagine my concern when I registered a brand new domain with SBI and had to start thinking about providing new email addresses to people out in cyberspace. I certainly don’t want to end up with another steady flow of spam flowing into my new domain.
Thankfully, before I decided on my email strategy, I did a little reading about SBI’s Spam ‘n Virus Blast service.
In a nutshell, SBI uses state-of-the-art technology to protect every SBI owner from getting inundated with junk email and email-born viruses. The virus stuff, albeit very important, is the easy part. But spam? Now that is another problem altogether.
Here’s what I learned about how SBI protects it’s customers from spam:
1. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is allowed to email an SBI owner without FIRST being whitelisted. This means your email address must be added to a database of known safe senders. If a non-whitelisted person sends an email to an existing SBI-domain email account, they will receive an error message back with instructions on how to whitelist themselves.
2. They strongly encourage all SBI owners to never post an email address on their website in a human readable format (ie. mailto: links in HTML). Seedy characters on the ‘net can easily grab those and add them to their spam databases. Rather, SBI encourages users to create custom forms (ie. “Contact Me” form) using the integrated Form Build It! tool. When a site visitor fills out a Form Build It form and includes their email address, that person is automatically whitelisted and can then send email from that address to any address on my SBI domain.
Sidenote: SBI is even in the process now of integrating CAPTCHA into the Form Build It tool. If you’ve never heard of CAPTCHA, I bet you’ve seen it. It’s where you are presented with a distorted graphic showing letters and/or numbers and you have to type them in before you’re able to submit a form. This prevents automated spam-bots from spamming via a form on your site. If you want to see CAPTCHA in action, simply post a comment here on my blog.
Anyway, #2 (Form Build It) is pretty slick and that works great, but it’s #1 that causes me some concern. The error message with whitelisting instructions is all well and good, but what guarantee do I have that a potential new customer is going to actually read the error message? Are you telling me I have to constantly worry that I’m not seeing important email from potential new customers? I think not.
Enter — The WORMHOLE!
A wormhole email address is an ingenious invention from SBI that solves the spam problem for good. Basically, in a matter of a couple minutes, I can create a new email address, designate it as a wormhole, and specify how long I want it to live. Anywhere from 5 days up to 60 days, or I can create a permanent wormhole. So now, anyone who sends email to the wormhole address will get automatically whitelisted and be able to send email to any account on my domain. After the wormhole reaches the end of its predetermined lifespan, it disappears and stops accepting new messages.
So, where would you use a wormhole? That’s simple. Anytime you provide an email address offline such as on business cards, brochures, flyers, etc. Or, whenever you sign up for something online and want to make sure you receive email just long enough to get the information you signed up for.
Doing business with Paypal is another great use for a wormhole. When someone pays me via Paypal, I get a notification email from the person sending the money, not from Paypal. So how do I make sure I always see those messages when I have no idea what address they might be coming from? Create a wormhole, of course! I simply setup a permanent wormhole address called something like paypal-incoming-money@My-Really-Cool-SBI-Domain.com and attach that address to my Paypal account. Done! I’m protected from spammers forever, and I’ll never miss an important email.
Of course, wormhole accounts are only available to SBI owners (hint, hint) but I just thought they were so cool I had to share. Maybe I should think about converting Mauder.com over to SBI so I can eliminate the 1000+ junk messages I get every day.
Hmmm…