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What are people are doing with your email address?

If your business has its own domain name, it can be quite simple to keep track of what people are doing with your email address.

We'll use our own company as an example. Harris Campbell's domain name is "www.harriscampbell.com.au". To email a general enquiry to us, you'd use the address "info@harriscampbell.com.au". Other addresses for Harris Campbell exist, and they all end in "@harriscampbell.com.au".

So far, so good!

If you own your own domain, you can set up your email so that ANYTHING addressed to your domain name is sent to one particular email address. This means that if people mis-spell or guess email addresses, those emails still go to SOMEONE, rather than just "disappearing".

So, our email could be set up so that all this "stray mail" is sent to "info@harriscampbell.com.au". Email sent to:

• inof@harriscampbell.com.au, or
• michelle@harriscampbell.com.au

would be forwarded automatically to "info@harriscampbell.com.au", rather than becoming lost.

You can use this to your advantage when you next have to sign up at a website to get access to information, or receive a newsletter (ahem ;).

Simply set all "stray mail" to go to a particular address (ask your web hosting company or Internet Service Provider, ISP). Some ISPs may call this a "catch all".

Then, the next time you have to sign up for something, use the name of THAT company for your email address. For example:

• amazon@harriscampbell.com.au
• yahoo@harriscampbell.com.au
• acme@harriscampbell.com.au

How does this help? If we were to receive email addressed to acme@harriscampbell.com.au, but the email wasn't from Acme, we'd know that Acme had provided our information to other companies!

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