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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?"
Every time I buy something on-line I have to provide my billing address so now the e-mail address I use and possibly more (can it read cookies?) is known to the vendor who can turn around and sell that information to others. How easy is it for some Javascript or something to poke around for e-mail addresses when you are at a site? Also, my e-mail providers know my address - i.e. yahoo, google, aol, apple and comcast. Could they be selling that information? I wouldn't be surprised.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
I just handle electronic spam like normal junk mail. Hit Ctrl+P and then throw the damn thing away. Good riddance.
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I have 13 e-mail addresses. E-mail the public one, and you get sent a riddle, which if you answer correctly gets you the next e-mail address. Each riddle is more fiendish than the last, and nobody has reached the 13th e-mail address.