How To Track Email Spam With GMail
If you are anything like me you will find your email inbox littered with spam. Even though GMail is pretty good at spotting spam, and getting better all the time, On the odd occasion some spam will still get through.luckily GMail have a "feature" that will let you track which sites are spamming you, which sites are selling your email address and which sites are compromising your personal information.
Here's how it works. When you enter your GMail address on a site or registration form, For instance domain.com, don't enter username@gmail.com. Enter username+domaincom@gmail.com as your email address. GMail will still send the email to the username@gmail.com account but it will use the address username+domaincom@gmail.com. GMail will use whatever comes before the + symbol as the email account to send the message to.
Essensially, this means you can have multiple email addresses, One for every online form you fill in, All in the one account.
So over time, By using this method, You will be able to easily find the email spam offenders.
I don't think GMail done this specifically to track spam, So if you have any other handy ways of using this feature please post them.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, November 16, 2006 at 11/16/2006.
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Posted byany clever spammer would probably get rid of everything between the plus sign and the at sign for any gmail-bound adress . nonetheless, good tip, especially for semi-spam from companies who are keen on sending plenty of updates -- amazon come to mind.
Posted by
Thanks for posting this. It's easy to take out the +anything from email address, but by the time spammer discovers this, I would at least know which sites are selling my email address. Very nice tip in fact.
Another good way to prevent spamming would be implementing SPF by all major hosting companies. This will bring down the amount of spamming emails to a great extent.
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