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Recently, I became really tired of all all the spam messages i was getting on one of my e-mail addresses. So I decided to run a little experiment.
Not many know that in gmail if your address is like progamer.soul@gmail.com (not my address of course) anyone can send an email to progamer.soul+<whatever>@gmail.com and you still receive that email in your inbox. So sending emails to progamer.soul+smart@gmail.com, progamer.soul+idiot@gmail.com or progamer.soul+jhsdjkdhs@gmail.com they all end up in progamer.soul@gmail.com.
So for a month, whenever I wanted to register on a site, I would use this e-mail, but with a little extra. I would add +<site_name> in my e-mail.
Examples:
-for ebay, I would use progamer.soul+ebay@gmail.com
-for teamliquid, I would use progamer.soul+teamliquid@gmail.com
-for reddit, I would use progamer.soul+reddit@gmail.com
Of course, sending emails to these addresses would all go to my inbox.
So why did I do all this?
Simple. To see who was actually selling my e-mail to these advertising companies. If I received a spam message sent to progamer.soul+teamliquid@gmail.com, it was obvious that teamliquid was selling my address and so on.
I would then create filters. So if I received spam on progamer.soul+teamliquid@gmail.com, I would redirect the spam to a teamliquid address. So I would give spam back to whoever sold my address.
Notes:
- the e-mail address is purely fictive
- the sites I mentioned are just there as an example and did NOT actually sell any of my addresses
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So, any results worth speaking about?
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So far, some sites/forums in my country. For now, no big site spam.
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I knew about that feature but I hadn't thought of that use for it. I used it whenever I was given an email I was required to check, just redirect and create a filter to push it all to one folder. Your way is a good way of compartmentalizing spam, but often I find I don't want sites that even might send me things to have me main email. Props for the feedback loop, clever system.
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Very interesting, thanks.
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That is very clever indeed, but sadly you're also increasing the amount of spam wasting bandwidth on the internet.
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This is actually really ingenious, though I can't say it would do too much. If I use a site a lot, and I know they are selling my info, it's pretty hard to just up and leave if I enjoy the content. Google and Apple are both known to college data, but I can't really not use google or my macbook.
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Does your e-mail get successfully validated during registration if you use special characters such as "+"?
Edit: Apparently not on iCCup. However, what you can do is to use "." (dot).
E.g. email: foobar@gmail.com
You can type foo.bar@gmail.com and it goes to the same address.
Disadvantage: You have to write to a .txt file where you've registered with 1 dot, 2 dots, 3 dots and/or at what index.
Disadvantage #2: At some point you may have the same e-mail for several websites.
Disadvantage #3: You may still be denied registration if you use a dot on some websites. Not all of them though.
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why the fuck do they keep sending us spam anyway? I would never buy a product from someone that keeps sending me spam
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EPT
