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Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy details the tactics of retailers and marketers to sell customer data. Examples include promising not to sell consumer data, but then 'renting' the data, and the use of shopping cart software with different privacy policies than the merchant."
You might also try username+foo@domain.com sendmail lets you have as many +bar accounts as you want.
I use +comdex and +networld on the end of my username so I can filter the stuff I have to register for. Not everything supports it (I'm not sure about exchange) so YMMV.
For qmail users (like myself), it'd be username-foo@domain.com
Yeah that works. I have my own country, so when I buy from bn, I make a street named "bn street" and have them send mail there, or "amazon way," etc. If I get junk mail at bobscomputers ave, then bobscomputers.biz is likely the culprit.
Actually, I'm lying a lot.
As enlightened as your idea may be, warpath, it is illegal for most users to run their own mailservers with their ISP setup. Also, as noted above, it doesn't really apply to people who give out your physical address when they shouldn't.
We are not completely without alternatives, though.
Perhaps to REALLY screw them up, we should invoke some kind of e-mail trading system, so that demographics identification is no longer effective and they leave us alone.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Why not just use Spam Gourmet? It allows you to make disposable email addresses that forward to your main address. The addresses are unique based on a key word which helps you know where your spam came from.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I do exactly the same thing (with the user+mailbox@example.com format) and have found at least two otherwise reputable places selling my address. In both cases, when I confronted them, they strenuously denied ever selling my address to spammers (one going so far as to suggest that I was using the same obviously unique address elsewhere, or that a spammer had hacked into my system and sifted through my data looking for e-mail addresses to spam).
Clearly they leaked the address somehow. But I have to consider the possibility that one of their employees sold it on the side, or that their systems were compromised. In both cases, I presented these as the only likely scenarios and told them if they weren't going to take measures to prevent it, I would take my business elsewhere.
In addition to this trick, I have a subdomain set up as a 'trap' for spam, and automatically generate e-mail addresses using keywords, encoded IP addresses and date/time stamps to embed within web pages. Spam harvesters pick them up without a significant risk of someone legitimate trying to use one to contact me. With enough information in the e-mail address, you can go back and see exactly who harvested the address. ISPs frequently don't see these types of complaints, and if you're lucky, the spammer is doing the harvesting on a more persistent Internet account and not his throw-away spam injection account. (This is especially interesting for those Nigerian scams, since your local authorities have the ability to use that information to track the guy sending the e-mails by way of his harvesting.)