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| Thread ID: 72865 | 2006-09-28 22:37:00 | How to Find Out Who is Spamming You | CYaBro (73) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 487936 | 2006-09-28 22:37:00 | Have you ever wondered how you get spam? Now you can find out where it comes from . The first step is to get a free Gmail account . Gmail was in beta for two years and it was a major status symbol to have a Gmail account because you could only be invited to get one . Now that it is out of beta, anyone can get a free account . (http://www . gmail . com) Gmail has an interesting quirk in which you can add a plus sign (+), followed by any additional text, after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox . This feature is called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with . The really cool feature is that all these new addresses you make up on the fly come to the SAME inbox . The major difference: You can see which plus-address it was sent to, and therefore know where the e-mail came from . The easiest way to do this would be to use the name of the company or service you were signing up at . Say your address was John@Gmail . com and you were signing up at Monsanto . You would simply sign up as John+Monsanto@gmail . com and it would still come to your inbox . The difference: If you started receiving e-mails to that address from companies other than Monsanto, you'd know Monsanto sold your address and was spamming you . The beautiful thing about this system: You could put a filter on those plus-addresses so all of them would go into your spam folder and you would never have to see them again . PS Sorry to the John who has the above email address as you will most likely get a lot of spam now :D |
CYaBro (73) | ||
| 487937 | 2006-09-29 00:41:00 | Thanks CYaBro - something which will be quite handy for future reference. | somebody (208) | ||
| 487938 | 2006-09-29 01:15:00 | apart from its interesting to know how they got your addy, that won't actually be helpfull. a lot of emails are harvasted from infected pc's or hacked forum sites or even buisnesses that have gone bust selling the info off for a bit of $$$. it in no way will stop you being spammed. however its very handy to have disposable addresses, most ISP's allow you to have a few. when one gets on the spammers list simply close that name and make another. |
tweak'e (69) | ||
| 487939 | 2006-09-29 01:46:00 | But how long before the spammers realise this and simply spam the gmail address without the +? It's not hard to do; a single line of code can extract the real address. | Erayd (23) | ||
| 487940 | 2006-09-29 01:57:00 | Interesting tip there, thanks CyaBro! [Edit] I am curious, is there any particular reason as to why you select Monsanto as a guinea pig there? :D [Edit 2] PF1 FAQ Editors might consider putting this tip on the FAQ:D |
Renmoo (66) | ||
| 487941 | 2006-09-29 01:59:00 | PS Sorry to the John who has the above email address as you will most likely get a lot of spam now :D minimum number of characters for Gmail signup is five. So no LeeT@gmail.com for me |
bob_doe_nz (92) | ||
| 487942 | 2006-10-01 01:22:00 | minimum number of characters for Gmail signup is five. So no LeeT@gmail.com for meWhat about "TonyL"? I kinda think it's only a matter of time before spammers simply add a "+random_word" to any gmail address in order to avoid the spam filter, so it will be interesting to see what happens after that. |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 487943 | 2006-10-01 03:07:00 | What?? What about TonyL? Haha, LeeT would be cool! | mejobloggs (264) | ||
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