invalid.org.uk

How to avoid receiving unsolicited junk email (a.k.a. spam).

Fed up with your inbox filling with spam? You should take steps to prevent your real email address being known to spammers. There are many ways they harvest addresses, here are some examples:

• Using viruses to steal address books from your correspondents' computers
• Hacking web sites and internet connected systems
• Reading your address of a public webpage
• Scraping your email addres from your postings on Usenet or other forums

So keep your address off spammers lists; avoid placing it 'in the open' where it can be found

Usenet News Groups

Even as far back as 19 September 2004 our junk email destruction service saved one of our users downloading more than 150 Windows viruses masquerading as Microsoft security patches. This was in excess of a 17 Mb download. At the time, our user was on a dialup connection! Do you simply want to cut off one source of junk email? If you’re using Windows you will want to avoid viruses spread by email sent to addresses harvested from usenet postings or other sources.

If you are fed up with receiving spam to the address you use for usenet or other postings, but your news provider insists that you use a real address, it’s high time you used a valid address where all the replies end up being binned. Perhaps your email ISP only gives you one address or you don’t know how to create one which is a black hole. This is what invalid.org.uk is for. Black-hole email addresses which validate as genuine. Contact me with your desired username (e.g. yourname@invalid.org.uk) and a note of your genuine email address for instructions on how to obtain one. Your @invalid.org.uk incoming email will not be forwarded (it will be deleted from the server). I will keep an offline, paper-based register of authorised users of invalid.org.uk addresses. You keep the address for life.
(N.B Use of an unregistered invalid.org.uk address will attract a charge of £50 per usage.)