Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail?

TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"

Comments

GMail

[Aladrin]

Once again, GMail is my solution to this. Prior to GMail, I used spamgourmet to keep my inbox clean. The oldest email I have used to get 30,000 emails per month that were all SPAM. Right now, it's getting about 11,000. (I haven't really used that address in a long time.

I have had maybe 10 SPAM emails in the last year make it to that inbox. (It's hosted under Google Apps.)

So once I found out how well Google's SPAM filters work, I quit caring about giving out my main email address. I give it to everything now, and if a company SPAMs me, I just mark it as SPAM. When enough people do that, it seriously hinders their ability to contact their legit customers, and they learn a valuable lesson.

There's a little bit of fallout from people who use the SPAM button incorrectly, but I think Google does its best to account for that, too.

Re:I had enough

[Tubal-Cain]

I use 2 emails, one for spam and one for private mails. Now both my emails are full of junk...

It should be:
One for email from IT persons.
One for registration confirmation and chainmail-forwarders.