How to know which Online Accounts are Selling your Email to Spammers

The number of spam I receive in my email account every day always enrages me. It just doesn’t get tired of filling-up my inbox and camouflaging all the important ones.

So I decided to start up a program to figure out who is selling email addresses to the spammers. I’ll start with a fresh new Gmail account, because they offer the feature that I need, which is a (+) plus addressing.

Basically, (+) plus addressing means if my email address is DONOTSPAMME@gmail.com, then consequently I can also receive email on DONOTSPAMME+geico@gmail.com.

For each and every one of my online accounts, I will change my email address to DONOTSPAMME+accountname@gmail.com, where DONOTSPAMME is my actual email name, and accountname is set to the account I am logging into.

For example, I’ve got the following: (not actual addresses, just an illustration)

Geico: localtechguy+geico@gmail.com
Newegg: localtechguy+newegg@gmail.com
Citibank: localtechguy+citibank@gmail.com

To make sure this works, I just have to make sure that I don’t start flashing these accounts around. So I will not use these accounts when posting on newsgroups or anything like that.

So when I start getting junk mail on this new account, I should be able to immediately see who is selling my address, because it will show up as username+guiltyspammers@gmail.com

You can give this a try and if you have also figured out who it is that is selling your email to spammers, please drop a comment here so we can collectively submit a notice to those people behind it.