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Author Topic: Use Gmail to Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses to identify spam source  (Read 20492 times)

patteo

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Came across this interesting idea to track down spam sources and dump it.

Clipmark
"Use Gmail to Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses:

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here's how it works: say your address is [email protected], and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it [email protected] and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to [email protected]. Then add the label work).

More real world examples:

Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.

Example: You could use
[email protected] for nytimes.com
[email protected] for freestuff.com
Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.

Automatically label your incoming mail: I've talked about that above.

Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don't check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.

Example: For the mailing list, you could give [email protected] as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address automatically. Then you can just check in once in a while on the archive if you want to catch up.

"
http://clipmarks.com...9-87A9-DF25D17EDAE9/

Eóin

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Ah, this is something similar to what I do for my mail accounts protected by TMDA but I never knew you could do it with Gmail too :Thmbsup: .

AdIyhc

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So is this like the Yahoo feature? Sorry I'm a bit slow in understanding.

nudone

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nice gmail feature (does yahoo do the same thing then?).

i remember this kind of dummy email address method was discussed before on the forum but i've still not got around to implementing it.

AdIyhc

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Yahoo has the similar feature.

Just tested this. This is so cool for gmail! Now it's time to delete unneccesary email addresses. :D

Thanks for the info!  :Thmbsup:

NigelH

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In case you're wondering, only Yahoo Plus ($) offers that feature.

Luvz2Fly

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I really liked that idea for spam tracking until I realized its only gonna take spammers a few minutes to figure out that if they remove the +xxxx from any Gmail account they have a valid email still that's not tracked to any one place...still nice to have an unlimited amount of email addresses for free!  ;)

tomos

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I was just trying to download the trial version of TexNotesPro & it refused to accept the "+" version of my gmail address -
I wasn't expecting spam from them, but just using it anyway.
[my "normal" address worked]
Tom

TucknDar

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darn, why didn't I discover this feature sooner :(

rjbull

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Anyone using spamgourmet - free disposable email addresses, strong spam blocker, short learning curve for disposable, one-time or "n"-times usable e-mail addresses?


bearbottoms

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Anyone using spamgourmet - free disposable email addresses, strong spam blocker, short learning curve for disposable, one-time or "n"-times usable e-mail addresses?



I use SpamGourmet and Dodgeit.  Both are super. http://www.dodgeit.com/

Wordzilla

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I use SpamGourmet and Dodgeit.  Both are super. http://www.dodgeit.com/
Welcome to our forum, bearbottoms! One of our members posted about your impressive freeware site yesterday. What a nice collection! :-*

Folks, check out bearbottoms' freeware site:Thmbsup:

rjbull

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I use SpamGourmet and Dodgeit.  Both are super. http://www.dodgeit.com/

Thanks!

I see you posted a link to this thread in alt.comp.freeware - thanks for the attribution to DC.