The Average White Guy

If you’re like me, then you’re junk mail folder needs to be emptied daily. Everything from PayPal Scams, Grow Your Penis, and Buy Our Pills, to jibberish, to cleverly crafted image fragments which don’t seem to fool the spam filters anyhow. Gmail and other free email providers out there tend to do a good job with classifying mail as spam - although since email has been around for so long, spam filters should be fairly intelligent by now. But have you ever wondered how these spammers get your email address in the first place? Did the spam engines happen onto your email address by randomly generating email addresses until it finally hit one? If that were true, spam wouldn’t exist, since it would take more resources to guess email addresses, and bounce returned mail when it guessed wrong. 

So, how do they get your email address? It’s simple. You’re using your email address to sign up for stuff and register for accounts all the time. All it takes is one crooked (or naive and stupid) web site administrator, and your email ends up in the wrong hands. Once your email address is on a crooked list, it stays there, and will ultimately end up on more lists you didn’t authorize.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Gmail can actually help you track down where your email address was compromised. Just a little diligence on your part and some sexy technology will show you exactly where things went wrong.

Most people arent’ aware of this, but Gmail has a feature built in whereby you can tag your email messages automatically which makes things a bit easier to organize. Most people know that Gmail has a filter option for your messages - which is the equivalent of putting a message into a folder. What most people don’t know is that Gmail will do this automatically for you. All you need to do is slightly modify your email address. Wait, what? Change my email address? Well, yes and no. You don’t need to sign up again, get a new account, or anything like that. You can still use everything the way it is, but when you enter your email into a registration form, you’ll type it a bit differently. I guess this sounds sort of retarded, but it’s really cool. Check this out:

Your email address is John.Doe@Gmail.com. You’re going to sign up for an account at WidgetForums.com and you want to see if WidgetForums.com is mismanaging your email account. You’re in luck, because using the auto-filter feature in gmail we can filter all messages from WidgetForums.com (or anywhere where WidgetForums.com sold this email address) by simply using John.Doe+WidgetForums@gmail.com. In this instance I set a FilterName to WidgetForums, so when I’m reading my mail, messages sent to that address will all be filtered with the WidgetForums filter.

Since that’s the email address you gave WidgetForums, that’s the address they will give to the spammers. *NOTE: I don’t even know if WidgetForums is real, let alone a dirty player. I just used them as an example.* When you get spam messages with the WidgetForums filter already attached, you know where it all started.

If other email providers allowed you to do this, it would make tracking spammers a cinch, and might even make prosecuting spammers an afterthought. All you need to do is remember to use the +FilterName when signing up for new accounts. Try it for yourself.