I was listening to the marketingovercoffee.com podcast the other day, and it mentioned a very interesting way to use Gmail to find mailing lists that sell or give away your email address to spammers. In short, if you add a '+' and additional characters after the user name (before the '@' sign), Gmail ignores that and will deliver the email to the normal address.
Why would this be useful to you? Let's say you need to sign up for many mailing lists using the same email address, and you want to be able to figure out which mailing list may have allowed your email address to fall into the hands of spammers. The solution is simple, sign into each mailing list with a unique identifier. For example, if you were to subscribe to the Speedbrake Publishing mailing list and you had the Gmail address your_name@gmail.com, join the list using your_name+speedbrake@gmail.com. Email to that address will still come to your_name@gmail.com address even though it was addressed to your_name+speedbrake@gmail.com.
Try it yourself. If you have a Gmail account (if not, get one set up for free at Gmail.com), and then join the Speedbrake Publishing mailing list at http://subscribe.speedbrake.com with '+speedbrake' inserted before the '@' sign. After you finish the signup process, you will get a confirmation email. By the way, this confirmation email gives you a link to a free copy of my book Parenting and the Internet, which is a useful guide for managing the online affairs of your child.
Do this for all of your new mailing lists, using of course a different identifier for each, and if you start getting unsolicited emails, you can easily identify who did you wrong and take appropriate action.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
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2 comments:
Couldn't a pro spammer simply use a script to strip the prefix?
Great in theory - tricky in practice as alot of sign up forms won't accept odd characters like a plus sign in the email address field.
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