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

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mouser:
Martin over at ghacks has a blog post up today about a tool that can scan (spider) a website and look for any pages that might be displaying your email address.

This can be useful to help you figure out if a forum is somehow showing your email when you post, etc.

But it got me thinking..

People always wonder if a site like DC, which tries hard to encourage people to sign up at our forum and newsletter, is actually doing this in order to collect emails to sell to spammers, etc.  I can say (and do on various pages on the site) unequivocally that this is something we don't do, will never do, and take very seriously.  We don't share the emails of our members with anyone, ever, for any reason.

But how do you know? And what about other sites?

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.

Are you following me?

So for example the website would have a chart that looked like this:

Original Website Where Email Address was SubmittedThis Email Subsequently Received Spam FromDate of First/Last Foreign SpamMyFaceSpace dot com (Jan 2004) SellYourHomeForFiveDollars dot com, civigrathemagicmedecine dot comJan 2004 / Dec 2009
This would be a site that people could visit to check to see whether a website was selling email addresses of its users and could be really helpful.

--

Does such a web service already exist?

Deozaan:
That's a great idea!

I signed up for an account at a site that said it didn't share my info with anyone and now I'm getting spam to that address. I know it was from them because in my gmail account I set up a dummy [username]+[SiteIsignedUpFor]@gmail.com

so for example, if my e-mail username was billybob and I signed up at somedumbsite.com, I'd do something like billybob+somedumbsite  ( at ) gmail.com

Now I'm occasionally getting spam to that e-mail address. To make matters worse, I e-mailed the site asking for more info about their privacy policy and why I'm getting spam from them and they never replied. What makes it most sad is that I've carefully protected that e-mail address for over a year and this is the first and only spam I get in it. Not counting e-mail from Xara, who won't unsubscribe me from their "special offers" list after I bought X1 from them some time ago.

PhilKC:
Sounds a bit like something McAfee do; SiteAdvisor. It gives some basic stats about how 'nice' websites are, examples follow:

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/donationcoder.com
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/bbc.co.uk
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/slashdot.org

Phil

mouser:
siteadvistor is a very nice service - i didn't remember they had something very close to my email testing idea(!)

so they do track emails received.. though they seem to do it on a somewhat ad hoc basis.. many sites they dont seem to report email results.  also i don't know how careful they are about using different domain names when signing up to prevent being filtered out.

does seem like they had the same idea though.  :up:

Deozaan:
Hmm, I just used siteadvisor to check out the site I complained about giving me spam and it says the site is okay. But it doesn't have any e-mail results yet.

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