How To Find and Fight Spammers With GMail
Posted on November 28, 2006, under Development.
Spammers come in all different flavors these days, and all it takes is purchasing something or creating an account somewhere to get on some ones list. Many people have a separate GMail account that they use for such situations, which works well and keeps junk separate from your real email account. However GMail gives you other tools to fight spammers.
Not only does GMail provide a great spam filter, it gives you the ability to have unlimited email addresses right within a single email address. You can append anything to the end of your GMail user name with the ‘+’ sign. For example “johndoe+WHATEVER@gmail.com”. This is a great feature for when you are signing up for something and later want to know how you got on a spammers list. Lets say you are ordering something online from Newegg.com, you can make your email address “johndoe+newegg@gmail.com”, and later know all email that originates from that account. This also makes it easy to filter out junk email with your spam filter settings.
Now, I must say I have ordered from Newegg a ton of times, and have never been spammed by them. I just wanted to use a fairly well known online store for an example.
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Scott on December 7, 2006
Nice write-up. It’s amazing how few people actually know that this feature exists. Unfortunately, there are a few companies that seem to think that an email address with a “+” in it is an invalid address. To circumvent this problem and to make it impossible for spammers in the future to get smart and remove the +whatever part, I devised another method. I’d explain how I did it here, but I’ve already written a blog post about it: http://www.illiteratewithdrawal.com/2006/10/companies-that-have-sold-my-email-address-to-spammers/
I also think it would be cool if Google managed to integrate the ability to report the spam directly to spamcop rather than me having to manually do it…or maybe Google is already reporting their spam there?