My Fake Email
I spoke to a tech support person a few weeks ago who told me something I never thought of, so I'm telling you.
You know how when you sign up for things, so many companies want your email address? I usually just don't give it. She gives it, but she created a "fake" email address she doesn't check, and she gives them that. I won't use her real name so you don't spam her, but let's say her name is Jenny. The email address she uses is jennysfakeemail AT gmail.com. And she actually says this to people. :)
The interesting thing would be to see how marketing ripples out. What if you gave each company a different email address, and then tracked what you got from whom? Assuming you gave those addresses to nobody else and didn't put them on the web or biz cards, each company would be the only one with that email. Then see who emails you. Just that company? Other companies? Spammers? Who sends you what offers?
I think that would be damn interesting. Has anybody done this and pointed out which companies are selling/sharing emails even when they're claiming they don't?
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You can do this sort of thing with sneakemail.com, though the e-mail addresses aren't human-readable and basically have to be written down. I've been doing it for years, though. I've caught surprisingly few companies being naughty. Most of the spam has come from addresses harvested from newsgroups and mailing lists.
Of course, the other half of SneakEmail's service is that you can turn off/delete the auto-generated addresses at any time, so once you start getting spam, you can turn it off.
Last I checked, SneakEmail is a free service up to a certain volume of traffic (pretty generous), and cheap after that too.
I found your blog because apparently some spammer out there tried to send e-mail *to* you *from* me. SpamArrest sent me an e-mail asking me to confirm. I'm pretty sure I haven't ever heard your name before, and there are no items in my outbox to your address, so I am going to ignore it. I hope nothing important is lost :-)
Posted by: Jonathan Gilbert | Monday, 12 May 2008 at 08:58 PM