Comments on: Figure out which Online accounts are selling your email to spammers

By: randaddy

randaddy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:45:33 +0000

@Fred Stevens

Yes, I think what you are referring to is the ability to set up a catch all email account. You can set up your mail client rules to automatically move the email with a specific address into a folder. This is a great method, as you can just make up whatever email you want (ANYTHING@YOURDOMAIN.COM) you don’t need to add that email on your mail server, instead, you just set up rules to sort the email locally (on your PC, not your server) Pretty straight forward and easy to do.

Don’t use the catch all email (the main one) for anything, because it will get spammed anyway. You can even give your friends a specific address that lands in your “friend’s” folder. You will also have the peace of mind to know you can check your main (catch all) account if you suspect it contains an important email.

By: john vickrey

john vickrey — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:14:54 +0000

So, if someone BOUGHT your Email address, so they could send you junk; wheres the money & why aren`t people with email accounts getting there CUT ?

By: switch2linux

switch2linux — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:25:14 +0000

i wrote a fairly long comment and it was not taken because i had used subject related words. (trying not to do it again). would you have a list of those words so i can know which ones stopped the comment from being accepted?

By: adam

adam — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:21:42 +0000

The downside of this, is those sites you may not visit on a daily basis, in which your “username” (often called login name too, or somesuch) is your e-mail address.

NOW, you must remember, that you signed up with “dontspamme+geico@gmail.com” instead of “dontspamme@gmail.com”.

I’ve had this mishap occur on some forums I registered to, thinking I would only be there “temporarily” – i.e.: one time tech question…..well turns out I love the forum, and go there a lot. Well, one day, I forgot my password (I lost my password safe file…lol) and well, the “forgot password” didn’t help much, because i couldn’t figure out what address I signed up with, and whether or not I used plus addressing

Now, if you got in the habit of doing this for “all” registrations, then it’s no problem….but as pointed out above, not all sites allow the “plus addressing” – and also pointed out, it can’t be too hard to programmatically clear out everything between the + and the @ sign

But for those “automated” spammers, sure, you might catch some

By: Mr Bill

Mr Bill — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:02:47 +0000

@Sandra

I have had the exact opposite experience. Things I specifically tell Yahoo to filter, it doesn’t. Yet GMail filters out about 99%+ of my spam…
Fortunately, Yahoo increased their box size so I can let the spam go and then just choose the majority of messages in the inbox and hit Delete.

By: Fred Stevens

Fred Stevens — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:08:39 +0000

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.

By: Sandra

Sandra — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:25:02 +0000

@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.

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:43:52 +0000

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

By: Do Not Spam Me

Do Not Spam Me — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:46:03 +0000

Jon Grant is right plus instead of using plus address, use instead disposable email addresses like from http://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.

By: Jon Grant

Jon Grant — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:44:40 +0000

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