Why fitz42.net's email works the way it does

Why is your email indy@fitz42-QQQ.net and why do you have to remove the "-QQQ" part of the email?

Spammers get emails many ways. One of the key ways is by doing what is called "crawling" Web sites (with computer programs called "spiders"). These programs look for things that appear to be email addresses, collect them, and then distribute the lists to others. Then they spam the hell out of you. This way, spiders crawling my site try to send email to indy@fitz42-QQQ.net. Since nobody has fitz42-QQQ.net as an email address, the email will bounce back--wasting the spammers' time.

Why stick the -QQQ part in the middle of the domain name, and not somewhere else?

Some spiders are getting smart, and look for leading characters commonly used, like DELETE or REMOVE. And adding it after the .net part likely wouldn't fool it. Hopefully, this does fool it. I could change the indy to indy-QQQ, but even though the spam wouldn't make it to me, it would bog down my mail server with mail attempts.