Everybody hates spam, the scourge of the Internet. One of the common ways to reduce the amount of spam one gets to use throw-away email accounts or aliases when signing up for compulsory registration services (another scourge of the Internet in my mind, but that’s just my opinion).<\/p>\n
Google even makes this easy with Gmail, as you can append a + sign followed by text to create a throw-away alias for your Gmail account (with the disadvantage that spammers could trivially strip + signs and determine your real email address if they were so inclined).<\/p>\n
One way to take this a bit further and figure out just who is spamming you, however, is to use unique aliases for every compulsory registration service you sign up for, and then take note of which ones actually start getting spammed. Provided you really don’t reuse those aliases, if one starts getting spammed, it’s a pretty good indicator that the person you gave it to is either compromised or selling your email address out.<\/p>\n
For example, I used a unique alias to sign up for some VMware Server serial numbers some time ago (they’re freely available), and recently (to my surprise) it started getting spams (of the type that I would imagine would be emitted by spam bots on compromised home systems). Now, either VMware is selling out my email to spammers of the more shady sort (which I would consider unlikely for a reputable company), or someone with access to VMware’s marketing mailing lists got compromised with some sort of malware at some point and the contents of the mailing list got inadvertently leaked out (oops!). I’d consider the latter more likely in this case, at least unless VMware has some sort of underhanded interest in herbal medication and the like that they’ve been keeping under the table…<\/p>\n
I think this is a good time to point out that even reputable companies make mistakes, and it only takes one person’s compromised Outlook to spill the goods on a mailing list. As a result, even with more trusted companies, I am more inclined to use throw-away aliases rather than my main alias, so that I can cut off the throw-away aliases when they start getting spam some time down the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Everybody hates spam, the scourge of the Internet. One of the common ways to reduce the amount of spam one gets to use throw-away email accounts or aliases when signing up for compulsory registration services (another scourge of the Internet in my mind, but that’s just my opinion). Google even makes this easy with Gmail, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nynaeve.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}