Academic- highly spammed addresses?

[jmihawkins]

Has anyone ever encountered a suggested list of website email-addy's that should be avoided by the smaller-time website owner in order to reduce the time involved in spam-handling tasks?

I would think generic addresses like sales@, info@, contact@, etc would all be obvious targets - you know, all the ones that make the most sense to use. But I wonder if there's list of the not-so-obvious?

I was forced long-back to blackhole the W3C 'required' addresses - abuse, postmaster, webmaster - couldn't keep up with the volume.

I enabled the 'default' pop-box the other day, thinking I would watch it for a couple of weeks just to see what addresses spammers were hitting me for. The mails started coming thru immediately, faster than I could hit the 'receive' button, and before I could get it closed down again (2 minutes maybe?), I had over a 100!

With that kind of volume banging against a low-profile site like mine, I begin to understand the absolutely staggering numbers I see re: spam traffic, and I further wonder how much faster the entire net could be w/o that crap clogging up the fiber/routers/switches/servers.

[kitchin]

Good question. Avoid one, two and three letter names? Although I guess one-letters are not used too much. Common first names would be good to avoid. Maybe on the other hand, "first.last@example.com" is a good pattern to use, those would be hard to guess.

[Wassercrats]

I was once unable to unsubscribe to a mailing list because I had a mail@ address, which was blocked by default by the mailing list software, so add that to your list.