Is Someone Selling Your Email Address?

Do you ever wonder if a website you’ve subscribed to has sold your email address?  I do often.  And even though email is being slowly replaced as a communication medium by Twitter, Facebook and other tools, recently I’ve been getting way more spam that usual.

So how do you track who is selling your precious email address?

You create a new email address for each site you opt into. I am NOT talking about going out there and creating a NEW account.

Sounds complicated right? Well, actually its not. Most email systems out there will let you use the “+” symbol as a separator between your name and the special email address identifier you create. Then you can type whatever after the “+” sign that to track that email.

For example, lets say your email was coolguy@gmail.com and you wanted to go get some free recipes from freerecipes.com.

Just create and an email of coolguy+freerecipes@gmail.com for the email you submit.

Gmail, and most other email providers, will ignore the + symbol and anything that comes after it and you still get the email. Try it out… its pretty cool.

I use this trick to:

1) Know if people are selling my email
2) If they are I can easily filter it out based on the address and send it straight to my spam folder.

This way you’ll know for sure if anyone you subscribe to has sold your email address AND you don’t have to go out and create a whole bunch of “alter egos” online to decrease the risk of spam.

Have you subscribed to my RSS feed yet? You can also subscribe by email.