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Cool idea (does it exist?) - Find websites that sell your email address

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mouser:
It's a good point carol.  In fact in the corporate world this "trick" is employed so much it's kind of sick.  If a company's reputation suffers too much or they need to do something against previous promises, OR if the CEO massively embezzles stockholder funds, the solution is usually to change the name of the company, merge into another company, or replace the CEO and say "that was the old Company X, we are now company Y and we don't have any obligations or responsibilities based on what company X did.  Quite a nice scam they have going.

Anyway, no big business has ever contacted me expressing interest in buying DC and it seems very unlikely that something like that will ever come up. DC doesn't make enough for anyone to care, and i don't want to sell it.  I have too much fun with you guys.  If anything, I think there is a good chance DC will apply for official non-profit status in the future.

But the main thing protecting you from such an event is that this is a community site -- no big changes will be made without consulting with you guys first and getting approval.  Your email is your own, we have never shared member emails with anyone and won't.

Renegade:
Don't be so sure that just because you sign up at a site that they are spamming you or selling your email address to spammers.

I've got a domain with 1 email address. I have NEVER used the email address except at that site and it's not publicly available unless you sign up, in which case you get an email from it. But even before 1 person had signed up, I was getting spam through that address.

One of the most common ways (and indeed the best way) to gather email addresses is through bots on a computer. Once you've got an infected client, you search through their email client for addresses. All these addresses (mostly) are guaranteed to be real people or at least live addresses. You don't need to clean them either, e.g. removing 'dontspamme' from [email protected].

In short, if you use an email address, you WILL get spam because the people you send email to will eventually expose your address to spammers. It's only a matter of how long it is before you start getting spam.

Ok - enough of that - here's a brain fart...

Imagine an experiment where several people sign up for domain names then get email addresses at them. The email addresses are obviously not in any spam list if chosen properly, e.g. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and others like those are obviously already going to be spammed. But '[email protected]' or '[email protected]' are unlikely to be in that list. So... Everyone emails each other at least once, an perhaps uses an automatic program to send everyone in the experiment an email once a month (or whatever). How long is it before those addresses start getting spam? Can you track the source? Does everyone use a different email address for everyone else and the server uses forwarding to help track it, e.g. mouser has '[email protected]' to send email to me, but Ralf Maximus has something like '[email protected]' to send email to me.

Too much trouble to setup really, but it would be interesting to know.

markfarrar:
I used to use SpamGourmet a lot, but I'm finding more and more sites that I want to subscribe to (e.g. to get free offers, reports) are refusing to accept email addresses from there, and from other disposable services too (e.g. http://www.jetable.org/).

IQLover:

What would be good is a website whose only purpose was to register at other websites, using a UNIQUE email address given ONLY to that website, and then monitored and reported if that email was ever used in any email(spam) from someone OTHER than the original website.
....

Does such a web service already exist?
-mouser (October 25, 2007, 01:20 PM)
--- End quote ---

Hi Mouser,

I know this Problem for a long time and that's why i ALWAYS use so called disposable email-addresses 2 sign up with any sites! Mostly I use addresses from SpamGourmet.com NOW, I don't know if a website like you write about does exit but I can definitelly report 2 Sites that are selling members email-adresses (or mey be just do not protect them well enough):

1) Steekr.com
2) Joost.com

Hope this helps ...

stylecrime:
I host my own domain + email server, so it may be easier for me to do this than for other people, but I create aliases for my actual email address based on the names of the web sites I need the address for.

To explain:

My real address is [email protected].  If I'm registering at dodgysite.com, I create an alias, [email protected], and register with that address.  If, at any point in the future, I start getting spam addressed to [email protected], I not only know which site leaked my address, but I can just delete the alias and the spam stops!

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