Fight Spam, Use Google's Gmail's plus-addressing

Where does all the spam come from?? Hundreds of emails a month you never requested. Primarily it comes from email lists created by legitimate web sites and then sold to the spammers and not by the spammers intercepting internet traffic to find email addresses or viruses raiding outlook address books.

How do you fight it, easy let those legitimate web sites know that your none to happy that they've sold your email to a spammer. But how do you know which of the web sites that have collected your name and email are selling them to the spammers. Not so easy, but it can be a lot easier if you use a relatively little known feature in Google's Gmail, plus-addressing.

Here how it works, say you email is JohnDoe@gmail.com you can actually add a label to the address by adding a "+" plus the label to the end of actual email name. So if you wanted to add the label newsocks to your JohnDoe@gmail.com address it would become JohnDoe+newsocks@gmail.com.

So when newsocks.com asks you to add your name and email address you add your name, John Doe and your email address, use the tagged version JohnDoe+newsocks@gmail.com. Now when you log into your JohnDoe gmail account and see 50 spam messages addressed to JohnDoe+newsocks@gmail.com you know that the spammers have purchased you email address from newsocks.com, and you need to let newsocks.com know that your upset that they sold your email to the spammers.

But tracking spammers is far from the only use for Gmail's plus-addressing. Think about it, you can use the same techniques to keep track of tasks you need to do by adding the label +tasks and emailing the task to yourself. Projects can be tracked the same way...

Take a look at Use Gmail Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses for more information on how to use Gmail's plus-addressing.

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