How to catch sites selling your e-mail address to spammers using Google
If you’re like most people, not a week goes by that you don’t subscribe or enter your email address as part of registering on a new website. However, you have to be careful. Allot of websites are selling email address to spammers. These days we recommend using Google’s Gmail. Gmail has a few nice features which you can use to find out which websites may sell your email address to spammers.
Let’s say you are Tom Barton and you sign up for a Google Gmail account with the address tombarton@gmail.com. With Gmail you could use any of the following addresses and your emails will still arrive to the account tombarton@gmail.com.
TomBarton@gmail.com
tomBarton@gmail.com
Tom.Barton@gmail.com
t.o.mbarton@gmail.com
You can put any number of dots in your email address and it would still go to your primary Gmail account tombarton@gmail.com.
Another interesting feature with Gmail is that you can add text after your Gmail user id with a ‘+”. For example, you could register your email address at a website such as tombarton+website_name@gmail.com where web site name is the name of the website that you are registering your email address. Your conformation will still be forwarded to tombarton@gmail.com because Gmail doesn’t recognize any combination of words or numbers after the “+” sign.
The great part about using Gmail and registering your email address with the add-on of +website_name is that now you catch websites selling your e-mail address to spammers.
For example, suppose Tom Barton is going to enter his email address as part of the registration process for XYZ Company. He could register using the email address tombarton+xyzcompany@gmail.com. His conformation email would still arrive at tombarton@gmail.com.
Now the next time Tom gets a piece of spam in his email box he can check to see if XYZ company sold his email address by clicking on the show details hyperlink in the email and looking at the reply-to field in the email header. If the reply-to field of the email address has the email address of tombarton+xyzcompany@gmail.com then he knows the web site of XYZ Company sold someone his email address.
Of course, this will not work for previous registered web sites. It will only work for new sites that you resister with your email address with username+website_name@gmail.com format.
So if you don’t already have a Gmail account we would recommend getting one. With Gmail you can find out whom if anyone is selling your email address to spammers and take the appropriate corrective actions.
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