Fri, 30 Apr 2010

That's My Name!

I’ve been asked about the email addresses I give to businesses a few times recently, so it seems like time to write it up. When a business I deal with requests an email address from me, my first inclination is to simply refuse. If it’s a bank, I always refuse—I like to consign all email purporting to be from banks to /dev/null without further thought. If it’s a business that has some reason to send me email, e.g., to inform me about stuff I’ve ordered online, then I provide an email address.

Those email addresses are always of the form <businessname@notyourname.com> and they allow me to identify businesses who hand over email addresses to third parties (either intentionally or by incompetence) and to quickly cancel the address they use.

Some businesses protest about this use of their name and I tell them they have no choice. If they want to email me, they must use the address I give them. If they refuse to use the address I provide, I don’t do business with them. Some businesses say that they alone have the right to use their name and I tell them that I’m not infringing on their name, because only they will be using it if they keep it properly locked up.

And, as we all know, some businesses think that an email address provided to facilitate some real transaction allows them to spam you with all sorts of marketing you don’t want. I like having an easy way to stop that in its tracks.

As a side note, when I was looking for a new domain name just for this use, it was quite hard to find real names that had not been taken by the domain name squatter scum—but that won’t surprise anybody. More annoying was the number of names that have been registered by squatters without even having an associated name server.

Posted at: 11:59

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