[Techtalk] Dealing with allegedly respectable company who send spam

[Miriam English]

Akkana Peck wrote:
> I'm not really disagreeing, but there is one downside to using a
> lot of email addresses like this if you don't manage it carefully.
> 
> I find I've ended up with a slew of email addresses (maybe 20)
> and I'm not sure which ones I've given to which companies, so
> I'm nervous about turning any of them off because some of them might
> sometimes get useful mail.

I have my own domain name (miriam-english.org) and thus an infinite 
number of email addresses. What I do is when I sign up for some list or 
group I am a little suspicious of, I don't give them my normal email 
address, I give them one that describes them. For example if a company 
named xyz wanted me to give them my email address and I wasn't sure they 
were reliable I give them "xyz at miriam-english.org". It will still get to 
me through the catch-all on my account, but is easy to filter out. And 
if I start getting spam to that address I instantly know exactly who to 
blame.

Incidentally, a while back I signed up to a list using this technique 
even though I trusted the people involved. It seems their pages openly 
listed users' email addresses for a little while and were harvested by 
spammers. I've received a lot of spam to that address, even though I 
don't believe the group responsible was bad... just not as alert as they 
should have been.

Hope this helps.

	- Miriam

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
-----
Website: http://miriam-english.org
Blog: http://miriam_e.livejournal.com