Figure out which Online accounts are selling your email to spammers
I am constantly infuriated by the amount of spam I get in my email account every day. To quote a friend of mine: "Honestly, this should be the number one issue in the world today. Forget declaring war on random countries, let's declare war on spam, and institute the death penalty while we are at it!"
I couldn't agree more. So let's start up a program to figure out who it is that is selling your email address to the spammers. We'll start with a fresh new Gmail account, because they provide the feature that we are looking for, which is +plus addressing.
Essentially, plus addressing means if your email address is DONOTSPAMME@gmail.com, then you can also receive email on DONOTSPAMME+citibank@gmail.com.
So here's the plan. For each and every one of your online accounts, you will change your email address to DONOTSPAMME+accountname@gmail.com, where DONOTSPAMME is your actual email name, and accountname is set to the account you are logging into.
For instance, I've got the following: (not actual addresses, just an illustration)
Geico: geekervongeekerson+geico@gmail.com
Citibank: geekervongeekerson+citibank@gmail.com
For this to work, you have to make sure that you don't start flashing this account around. Don't start posting on newsgroups or anything like that.
Now when you start getting junk mail on this new account, you should be able to immediately see who is selling your address, because it will show up as username+guiltyspammers@gmail.com
If you figure out who it is that is selling your email to spammers, drop a comment into the box below.
Yeah i treid to do this but u cnt put a + in the email name.
Some websites may not allow you to do that, but most do.
o i was doinin wrong anyway
lol thxs
I have been using Gmail as my SPAM filter, which is very effective. I did a write up on my site. I haven't received a SPAM message since I set this up a couple weeks ago.
So my question is, why would you want to spend time finding out who is selling addresses? You would be constantly working at it and the point, I think, is to not have to deal with SPAM at all.
@mohawke: …spite?
I always use disposeable adresses from www.spamgourmet.org. It basically lets you create one-use adresses, forwards the first few emails to that account to an adress you have specified before and throws everything that comes after. Great tool!
Great idea, but perhaps spammers will just clean their email addresses of anything after the plus sign? like drop the "+foobar" from: myemail+foobar@gmailcom etc? Cheers, Jon
Jon Grant is right plus instead of using plus address, use instead disposable email addresses like from www.mailinator.com which gives you a random email address to provide to sites that require one before letting you proceed to whatever you want to do and mailinator would also allow you to check your inbox for let's say a password for a forum sent to your mailinator address.
The problem that i see with this kind of mechanism is that someday if GMAIL just stops this feature, we land ourselves in soup…
Cheers,
Vaibhav
@mohawke - I'd be interested to hear more about how you've used GMail to filter spam. I setup a Gmail account a year or so ago, but found that more spam landed in the inbox than over at my Yahoo account.
I pay for my e-mail, as it is included with my web hosting fee, and thus I have unlimited e-mail aliases. I have been using what is effectively the same as you have suggested (+addressing) for a number of years now, and it really works well. I have only found one site, though, selling my address when I did not expect it before giving out the address.
when I do suspect that a site to which I must submit an e-mail address may sell my address, i give out one that I will remember (i even have a txt file with such addresses stored), and if I find out that they really do, I will add a custom filter/rule for my inbox to just delete such messages in addition to reporting them to the appropriate authority. it's just good business.