Spam vs Your Inbox: The Battle Continues

A friend of mine just let me in on two great tricks that can assist in creating a "spam-free" environment for your inbox.

~ Find the culprit:

When giving out your email address to a company for promotional purposes, there is a way to find out whether that company is selling your information resulting in spam mail. When you give the email to the company, add a plus symbol and something that will remind you of who the company is. For example, if you fill out a promotional card for Pita Pit, you would give them the following email:

JohnDoe+famous@gmail.com      

(original email: JohnDoe@gmail.com)

Adding the plus sign does not affect the sending capabilities, it just creates a flag for you. Now, if you receive spam to your email, and the sender has the adjusted email address as the recipient, you know who sold or handed out your information.

~ Find out if a spam bot is sending emails (from "you") to your contacts list:

Create a dummy contact (SomeFakeEmail@whatever.com) and send them an email. You will receive an email from your email provider saying the message was undeliverable. (If you are using a gmail account, you may receive the undeliverable notification up to three times because they will try to send out the email once a day for three days.) 

Make sure the fake email is added as a contact on your email's address book. Now, if you receive an undeliverable email in the future you will know that something someone has sent an email to ALL of your contacts, including the contact that you have already established is an undeliverable address.

DN