second email address recommendations

Back in the bad old days some ISP's limited the number of email accounts you could have but I have always been able to have enough accounts for each member of the family. These days most will allow you to create multiple accounts I am sure even BT do not limit you to one email address.

Richard

But you still get the bounces anyway.

So you can still mine. It just creates a lot more traffic.

Simply because they may blacklist your mail provider altogether if it is badly behaved.

In my case I am strongly tempted to simply assume that if someone IS using a gmail address it's spam and reject ALL gmail mail

(I did reject all of india once (.in) , but had to unblock it to correspond with a genuine Indian gentleman...)

Except by definition the primary MX record points to the final destination.

I do.

Not foolproof, but it certainly rejects all spoof addresses that simply do not exist..i.e. have no MX records at all (or A records).

And it also gets rid of MOST valid domains but invalid users - which is another trick the spammers try.

usually, mostly.

It may well fail in cases where split domain routing is at play (commonly used when migrating users between platforms). There the MX record points at the new host, however on receipt of mail it may fail to resolve the user, however rather than hard fail at that point, it again forwards to the next handler in the chain - typically the old mail host.

For me, it's the personal experience of myself and my acquaintances. For you, see for example,

Use Hotmail(Outlook. You can actually choose whether it's a Hotmail or Outlook address) VERY simple .

Personally I would avoid any account tied to your own phone/broadband provider.

If at any time you switch your email accounts disappear. Perhaps BT is now different?

I would use a live or gmail account. But look in the trash area just in case.

GMX - I've been using them for about 5 years now. No spam (literally, not one in the 5 years-odd I've been using this NG address), good choice of names (because nobody else uses them), clear web page access, and reliable.

I do wonder what their business model is.

One of my Xmas jobs is to move my 21 year old hotmail account into one I own the domain of, and arrange to collect my mail directly.

Certainly Hotmail - despite being told to not spam-check mail - spam checks mail (badly) and things end up in "Junk" before my mail client (Evolution) can get to them.

It's irritating, as having an account which is <myname>@hotmail.com was a subtle way of pointing out how much experience I have. But that said, owning the domain <myname>.com is a good substitute. With <myname>.eu as a nice garnish :)

The moment gmail was mandated (plus a Google+ "account") for access to the Playstore, was the moment I decided to never use it except for Google stuff. Currently it's still obeying my "forward everything to hotmail" rule.

You can't trust any mail provider where you don't own the domain these days.

Which begs the question: What's in it for them ? I'm guessing irrespective of privacy laws, they are busily scanning emails for keywords to sell onto the "big data" fetishists.

It shouldn't be .com unless you are an American company. Are you? For preference, you should use .org.uk .

.com is commercial and not geocited. I use it (or reserve the right) to use it for commercial activities.

Be aware you can never disable their spam checking. Which means you have to do it. Every day, if you don't want to miss something important.

You can now, of course, just use <something>.uk

Adam, have a look at

There are easier and more flexible ways of achieving this.