Who is selling your email address?

It is very common that people get spam emails. The filters are GMail, Yahoo, hotmail etc… does a wonderful job to categories most of the spam mails and normally will not deliver in the inbox. Still you will get a bunch of them if you are using your email in all the subscription forms found on the internet. Yes, you want to get notified about the offers, new posts, et, etc… So you keep subscribing to these sites.

There are some companies, who sells the email addresses of their customers to email lists and email marketers. This then get sold further and soon it will be all over the internet.

So are you getting spammed too much? If yes, here is a simple tip for you. Do not give your email addresses to the untrusted websites. Many of you find it difficult not to subscribe, so here is a little bit advanced tip for you if you have a Gmail account.

As mentioned in one of our previous posts, How to use one email account for creating multiple twitter accounts, you could use the “+” sign in your email account to subscribe at the websites. Let us see some examples. As you know, binoy@gmail.com and binoy+techwire@gmail.com will deliver the emails to binoy@gmail.com email box. But the “To” address in both emails will be different. Using Gmail filters, you could easily filter and label them for better tracking.

When you subscribe at a website, be sure to use the +addressing method in every website you subscribe to. For example: You could use

binoy+indiatimes@gmail.com for indiatimes.com
binoy+indiaplaza@gmail.com for indiaplaza.com

If you get emails from unexpected sources on the above emails, then it can be considered that your email address is already sold or rented to others. IT can help you tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers. You can use the filters and automatically send them to the trash.