Use Gmail to Find Out Who’s Spamming You
This technique has been around for a long time apparently I just didn’t know about it. But now I know and I’m going to tell you about it. That’s just how it works folks.
So, I’ve been using Gmail since way back when you could buy an invite on eBay in exchange for an interesting story and I’ve NEVER heard about this spam-finder technique. If you use Gmail to any extent you should be aware that you can set up ‘filters’ to auto-file emails based on rules you set (It really should be called ‘tagging’ but whatever.) Anyways, I find this technique very handy for keeping my inbox in check.
This spam-cop strategy I am speaking of now basically makes use of filtering and one other technology whereby you modify your email address to include the name of any specific filter. It’s like this - if your original email address is: yourname@gmail.com, you can send an email to: yourname+myfilter@gmail.com and that email will get tagged with (or filtered into) the “myfilter” category. The interesting part is this - if you get in the habit of using a filter specific email when you register at a new place, you’ll be able to tell who sold off your email address. Recently I registered on about 45 different social networking sites and now that I know this, I should have been using something like: dennis.plucinik+fluther@gmail.com instead of just dennis.plucinik@gmail.com. This way, if Fluther decides to ‘monetize’ my account by selling it off, the email will have the filter included, and now what I’ll see is a big ass bloated Fluther category which never even hits my inbox.
By the way just to clear their good name, I’m sure Fluther isn’t the type of place that would do that sort of thing - at least they seem colorful enough, and that’s trustworthy right?
The bottom line is that everyplace has privacy policies and such but who reads them? We just sort of go about our business and hope companies have any decency to not sell off our emails. And anyways, everyone expects to get spam and and nobody really concern themselves with tracking down the culprits because there’s not really an easy way to do it. Until now.
The only downfall to this strategy is remembering which email you used to register.
As always, if you have other suggestions, techniques, etc. Let me know. Also if you’ve used this feature and have found that a specific company sold off your email - please let us know which company it was 
By the way, here’s the article to the article that informed me of this - it’s from September of last year:
http://www.digitalalchemy.tv/2006/09/use-gmail-generate-unlimited-e-mail.html
8 Comments, Comment or Ping
dennisplucinik
I did like 1 1/2 seconds of searching around, and I found an old Digg link. Lots of good conversation here:
http://digg.com/tech_deals/Find_out_who_gives_away_your_email_address_with_Gmail_trick
I did notice however that the Digg link is to an article written in November 06 whereas the article I am linking to here was written in September.
I’m going to experiment and drop another Digg link. Let’s see what happens.
Sep 3rd, 2007
diosjano
Esta buena gracias
Sep 3rd, 2007
Charles Lau
Good info about this.. Thanks.. I never knew we can add a filter name in the email itself… The spammers are gonna get it!
Sep 3rd, 2007
dennisplucinik
I think I used it about 3 times already tonight!
Sep 3rd, 2007
BikiniGirl
hey, interesting technique I didn´t know about.. have to try it out the next time i give away my email adress..
Sep 4th, 2007
mg
All very well if one’s primary mail is gmail, which mine isn’t (I hate the way gmail works and although I have a google account I rarely use it). My primary account is with fastmail.fm and they are totally together on the spam issue. Just recently they enabled personal bayes database settings so I’m temporarily getting more spam because I’m teaching my personal database what I want to receive and what I don’t. After marking 8 particular messages as unwanted I’m delighted to see it recognising similar messages as unwanted and still not losing messages I want to see (no matter how spammy they may seem due to some of my correspondents not writing very good English). Of all the webmail services I’ve ever used (and that’s a lot as I’ve been online more than 10 years), fastmail is definitely the best. I strongly recommend it.
Sep 6th, 2007
Ben Finkel
Cool technique. I do worry that smarter email-list-sellers could write a simple script which strips out the “+company” from gmail addresses, but it’s definitely a neat idea.
Also, as the Co-Founder of Fluther, I can assure you we won’t sell your email addresses, ever. If someone asks us, “Will you give us a couple of your user’s emails in exchange for these wheelbarrows of cash?”–we’ll spit in their faces. If someone blackmails us to either give up your emails or show embarrassing videos of us as children, we’ll endure public humiliation. We won’t even use them ourselves. If we have important account notifications, we’ll send you telegrams.
Seriously, though, we don’t mess around your privacy. And thanks for the shout out.
Cheers,
Ben Finkel
Fluther.com
Sep 7th, 2007
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