As you know, gmail has an awesome spam filter. It’s the reason I started using it for personal email in the first place.
They also have a cool feature that is not at all well documented, which can help you find out where your spam is coming from. The premise is simple - you can attach ANY string to your email address with a plus sign like so:
yourname+spammersitecom@gmail.com
The email will still make it to your gmail account, and you’ll be able to see that string.
If you follow this format when signing up on web sites, you can track to see who’s selling your information — and essentially arrive at the source of the spam. Since most spam comes from your email spreading from one to many, this is where tracking down the source is important. If they’re scrupulous, you can just ask to be removed.
In one instance, by doing this, I found out that a web backup service I signed up for had shared my email to some advertisers, and I was able to opt-out (the source) before it went out any further.
You might try this on web sites that you post your email to as well - that’s where most of my spam comes from, and it’s enlightening to see which of my sites draws in the most spambots. It helps me decide where I should implement web forms instead of just listing my email address.
This is very similar to an idea I launched a few years back called spamtree.com (I’ve since taken the domain down). It was pretty basic: you’d sign up for a flexible email address like this (i.e. bryan-applecom@spamtree.com), and if they ever emailed you or sold your name, you could track that on a graph (and set up permissions that, for example, only allowed them to email you once). Presumably, the more your email was passed around, the graph would look somewhat like a tree with branches and nodes, hence the name.
It never caught on, probably because it was so nerdy (like me!), but I’m glad to see that gmail has introduced the backbone of this concept. I don’t even know if they *meant* to for tracking spam - but that’s what’s so fun about unadvertised features: no one is forcing you into a particular frame of mind, so you can be inventive in their use.
Posted on November 30th, 2007 by plusbryan
Filed under: Random
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