We hate spam and hate those spammers too. But how do we get spam? We get most of the spam from the spammers who buy our email address from the websites where we register and give out the email address.
It is absolutely impossible for us to find out who sold our email address to those spammers who choke our inbox with unwanted emails. But now there is a solution to find out people who sell our confidential information to others. Gmail provides a not so explicit feature which you can use to find out which website is giving out your email address to spammers. This will not work for the previous websites where you have already registered but you can use it for future registrations.
Here is how to use it:
1. While signing up for any new website enter your Gmail address as your_user_name+website_name@gmail.com.
2. Don’t worry, you will receive the mails as usual because Gmail doesn’t recognize any combination of words or numbers after the “+” sign.
3. Whenever you get any spam message just click on the “Show Details” link to expand the email header and find out the email address to which it was sent. The images below show a test which I did with a “+” sign on my email address.
4. If you had signed up according to the step number 1, you will be able to find out who gave your email address to the spammer.
Use this to find out which websites are selling your email addresses, check out their privacy policy and sue them if they lied. If you found this useful, don’t forget to share it with others.
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Great in theory but most registration forms consider email addresses with ‘+’ in them as a invalid and won’t take them.
Another technique is to add a . somewhere in your email address.
bobbarker@gmail.com should work the same as
b.obbarker@gmail.com
It would require a bit more setup, but if the + doesn’t work when submitting, it’s a decent alternative.
yup
Yes…the dots also work but it makes a little difficult to remember where and how many dots you had put while signing up for a particular website
You don’t think that the spammers can remove the +… if it’s a gmail account? just like they can remove .’s if they know it’s a gmail account.
This does not work in the vast majority of cases. Theoretically it should but most scripts are improperly coded to not allow the + symbol so in practice this fails.
I once tried to implement this but the first 8 or so places I tried to use it would not allow the + symbol… kind of makes this (actually rather old… been recycled on so many blogs as it has been here) tip useless.
Source?
http://revision3.com/tzdaily/2008-03-24gmail/
[...] of my coworkers shared this link today on a Gmail feature that allow you to track which site sold your email address. The idea being that if it violates their privacy policy you can sure them. - I have tried [...]
A good idea that I used a long time ago. This has nothing to do with gmail though. The use of the + character in this way has been a part of how email is handled since before the web existed.
@Craig…This looks limited to Gmail only. I tried it with Rediffmail and Yahoo and it did not work.
@Vikrant: Free services tend to bend the rules, but they get away with it because they have so many users. I run my own mail server and have actually never had an address made in this manner get rejected.
Of course, since I run my own, I could just set up regular aliases for myself and it would be impossible to tell apart from the “real” one
@Vikrant: I just tried sending one to yahoo, and you’re right, I did get a permanent failure. But its not working on yahoo and one other service doesn’t mean it’s gmail only. This has been around since way before google existed, perhaps before the google founders were born! and it still is an obscure function on many mail systems, for anyone who finds it useful and cares to try.
[...] read more April 5th, 2008 at 4:25 am [...]
Anti spam webinar-“Spammers Vs Today’s spam filters”
Today’s spam filters are not accurate and spam volumes are increasing rapidly. This will cost $42 billion for US alone. Spammers are using more innovation technology to send spam mails & Today’s spam filters are blocking only 80% of spam mails.
Register for a complimentary Webinar conducted by Abaca and Ferris research to know more about the spammers behind the black market. To register please click the link below:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=LPFKkdkFwOYltiQZtM_2bttw_3d_3d
It will be about 2 seconds before spammers add s/\+.*@/@/ if m/@gmail/ to their spam script
[...] Cette stratégie va pouvoir vous permettre d’identifier qui a revendu votre adresse email à un spammeur. Pas de commentaire jusqu’à présent Laissez un commentaire Fils RSS des commentaires pour cet article. URI de Trackback Laissez un commentaire Retour à la ligne et paragraphes automatiques, adresse courriel toujours cachée, code HTML permis: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> [...]
the net is awesome and shitty at same time. when good ideas come out to protect ourselves and people share it, they are just sharing it to the scumbag hackers and spammers as well so they can update their techniques and strategies. Not cool.
The main reason this will not work in most websites is because of something called SQL. Herd or it? Well most people haven’t, but the programmers need to have. SQL is a very powerful, dangerous, and fun language. If you have a data base with 100’s or even 1000’s of emails you don’t want someone with knowledge of such things trying to hack in.
So yes, this is great if it works, but it also if bad if it does. If it works it means that the website is most likely venerable to SQL insertion and should not be used.
Have you tried Spamgourmet yet. This makes it super easy to tell who’s sending you SPAM and it doesn’t require too much trickery.
PEACE
If it wasn’t obvious the site is spamgourmet.com. Quick to set up. I set mine up a couple years ago and have already caught a few companies reselling my mail when they said they wouldn’t. Fortunately, the e-mail account created using spamgourmet will expire by default after 6 messages, and can be increased indefinitely if desired.
Thanks! This is something I’ll be using a lot.
or just use sneakemail.com. I’ve been a paying member for almost 10 years now, and they’ve never let me down.
http://www.sneakemail.com
[...] How To Find Out Who Sold Your Gmail Address To Spammers – B.E.T.A. Daily.com [...]
Or just get a life … several in fact. Gmail (and most other mail servers) allows you to have multiple email addresses and to funnel them all to a single ‘catch-all’ address. When an address gets overwhelmed with spam, drop it. NEVER use the ‘catch-all’ address for any other purpose.
[...] out who’s giving out your Gmail address to spammers. Don’t let spammers sell your email out. This guide will let you easily find out who’s giving out your email to those annoying [...]
[...] of the things that I found interesting from supporting points is that Gmail allows you to find out who sold your [...]
[...] out who’s giving out your Gmail address to spammers. Don’t let spammers sell your email out. This guide will let you easily find out who’s giving out your email to those annoying [...]
[...] out who’s giving out your Gmail address to spammers. Don’t let spammers sell your email out. This guide will let you easily find out who’s giving out your email to those annoying [...]
@victor louis
“Today’s spam filters are not accurate and spam volumes are increasing rapidly. This will cost $42 billion for US alone.”
I’m ignoring the ironic part here that you are spamming about anti-spam seminars on an anti-spam forum. What I want to know is where people in the industry seem to always get such massive figures from for everything.
Why is an increase in spam going to cost $42 billion for the US? It doesn’t cost a lot in bandwidth to transmit spam, and deleting it from your inbox costs nothing. The only thing I can think of is time lost in productivity deleting spam, but even so… $42 billion?
It’s high time figures like this came with references.
“Another technique is to add a . somewhere in your email address.
bobbarker@gmail.com should work the same as
b.obbarker@gmail.com
It would require a bit more setup, but if the + doesn’t work when submitting, it’s a decent alternative.
”
not true, i have like four gmail accounts, two of them same except one has a . in it because I was getting spam on the first one, and obviously the seocnd one isn’t getting spam..so the period apparently, at least for me and everyone I know..will create a seperate account.
Use bugmenot.com to see if someone has already created a login
Use guerrillamail.com to create a fake address for an hour
[...] How To Find Out Who Sold Your Gmail Address To Spammers – B.E.T.A. Daily.com [...]