Elonta.com

Tired of spam in your Inbox? Well, here is something VERY useful I have found out and decided to share with you.

Here’s a scenario for you.

You’ve just made a new email account. You decided to sign up on SomeRandomWebsite.com, because it looks cool. You fill in your name and email address(which they swear upon their grandmother’s lives NEVER to divulge) and a few other details. Then you go to some other websites and do the same. Then a few days later you are getting email from organizations and people you never heard of, most of which are offering to give you Viagra? Who is sending you these emails?

Well, lets find out shall we?

All you need is a gmail account and some spare time. Don’t have a gmail account? Sign up here. Be sure to choose something easy for you to remember, like yourname@gmail.com.

Now, next time you sign up for something and have to provide an email address, you are going to have to use your gmail account. Only with a little “twist”.

We are going to use this little secret:

Say you want info on an offer by Jason, and Jason wants your name and email address so he can send it to you.

Well, great! Give him that email address(but your going to have to add something).
Say you made or have a gmail account called: givemespam@gmail.com

So what email address are you going to give ‘ol Jason?

givemespam+Jason@gmail.com

Now don’t panic. This is the secret part…when gmail sees the + sign in an email address, it ignores everything to the RIGHT of the plus sign(and the plus sign itself). So givemespam+Jason@gmail.com is treated in exactly the same way as givemespam@gmail.com. This is called Plus Addressing(a very good tutorial on this here)

That means if Jason decides to sell/give your email to ViagraForEveryone Inc(that dosen’t exist, I hope), and they send you an offer, you will know who gave your precious email away.

How? Well, just look at the top of your received messages, and it should say something like “ViagraForEveryone To givemespage+Jason@gmail.com”.

I’ll be sure to try and find out more tips like these, so check back! I hope you found this useful

The Elonta team - The visual startpage

Tags: email, spam

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 2:55 am and is filed under War on Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.