Keeping your own list
Nine addresses is more than anybody keeps in their head, so this decision arrives whether you make it or not.
Where
| Where | Verdict |
|---|---|
| A text file you own | Good. You see the full string, you can annotate it, and you can prune it. |
| A password manager entry | Good, and encrypted at rest. |
| Paper | Good. Nothing running on your machine can alter it. |
| A browser bookmark | Poor. It hides the string behind a name you chose, and it is often synced to an account. |
| A message to yourself | Poor. It lives on somebody else's service and mixes with everything else you send. |
| Memory | Bad. Near enough is exactly the failure being exploited. |
What to note beside each
Two words and a mark. Where it came from, when you got it, and whether you have checked it. That is the difference between judging an entry eight months later and guessing about it, and almost nobody does it.
Pruning is the important half
Collecting addresses is easy and everybody does it. Deleting them is what actually protects you, because an address that has dropped off the published set and stayed in your list is precisely the thing that gets picked up by somebody else.
A retired address arrives with years of accumulated recognition attached: old posts, archived pages, unmaintained lists, bookmarks. Whoever answers at something resembling it inherits all of that without doing anything, and the traffic reaching them is disproportionately people who recognise the string and therefore do not check it.
The maintenance
- Compare what you hold against the published set every few weeks. Under a minute.
- Delete anything no longer listed, without keeping a copy.
- Update the date on anything you confirmed, so the note stays meaningful.
- If something you hold has vanished and you are unsure, treat it as gone. Being wrong in that direction costs nothing.