Email addresses are pretty important

I only just realised how important my email address is to me. It is pretty much my identity online.

I was messing around with setting up IMAP in Outlook. I have no idea what I did, but I ended up getting a chunk of spam, and some undelivered message notifications. It seems that I somehow triggered something, and a spammer started using my email address to spam people, using a spoofed “from” field. Then people think it’s me sending the spam, and I have a chance of getting my account disabled, as all the undelivered messages get bounced back to me.

I’m hoping right now that there won’t be much of a problem. Apart from the first lot of stuff, nothing further has come through. It would hurt to have to change my email address, as everything is tied to it. As I said, it is my online ID.

• Various Accounts with online stores, forums, etc
• This blog
• My Google Documents, and calendar etc
• All my contacts
• Job Applications

Everything would be lost if I lost this address. I’m starting to build a backup plan incase it gets lost, but I really like my address. It would be a massive pain to have to contact everybody with a new address.

I guess I shouldn’t use a free account as my main point of contact, and split things across various accounts. I’m thinking of setting up a domain with a few different accounts for different things.

Back to damage limitation!