American Woodworker Mag Sells E-mail List

[Pete]

I'm not sure if anyone is concerned about this, but...

FYI: If you send your e-mail address to American Woodworker Magazine, they will sell your e-mail address...

If you want to prove this for yourself, here's my "EZ Guide To Identifying Who Sells E-mail Lists" (I actually picked this trick up from a network security buddy of mine...):

1. Buy a domain, e.g., pete.tv
2. Purchase an e-mail account on your domain, e.g., [e-mail]
3. Select the option to have all e-mail not destined for e-mail accounts on your domain sent to your e-mail address. For example, if the e-mail address [e-mail] does not exist it will bounce to [e-mail]
4. When someone, such as American Woodworker Magazine, asks for your e-mail address, enter one that will easily identify the source, e.g.: [e-mail] (this is a non-existent e-mail account on your domain that will bounce to your e-mail account)

That's it. So, if someone, such as AWM sells your e-mail address, the person/people who purchased your e-mail address will have the address identifying who you gave it to.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure if the fine print of AWM specifies that you are giving them permission to sell your e-mail address, but I don't care. No one reads that stuff anyway and people who sell e-mail lists are not very honorable (even though I really like AWM, lots of good information...).

Just thought someone might find this interesting...

[Ba r r y]

I've been doing this for 20 years with USPS addresses. I simply stick some letters in the "company" field of the address.

American Express was the worst I've seen with snail mail list renting.

Barry

[Jim Giblin]

Your suggestion is intriguing. In your example, what will the 'from' address be when the email is received? That is, does it arrive addressed from 'AmericanWoodworkerMagazine' or 'Pete'? I'm thinking how it can be handled by an Outlook rule.

[Bob]

That's a fact of life with most commercial enterprises. Many email services are adding "address guard" or other similarly named features. My yahoo email is a commercial account and I use the address guard feature exclusively for any online email registrations.

Bob

[Fred the Red Shirt]

Some email software (e.g. the ones that work correctly meaning they conform to the RFC's) support tagged email addresses. THat is you can send to fredfighter+ [e-mail] and the email will be delivered to [e-mail] but the username fredfighter+google will appear in the To: field.

You can use the tag for filtering too, this is very helpful when you really do subscribe to something, order something online etc.

A lot of webpages will not alow one to subscribe with a tagged address, and some ISPs do not deliver them properly. Also, wiley, crafty spammers can de-tag them.

But that may be an option for some.

[Norman D. Crow]

Several lifetimes ago(G), SWMBO's uncle published a mag called "Engineering Opportunities". This was in the '60s, the space race job market was booming, and the mag was strictly a job search. It was free to anyone holding a college degree, and I got one as a relative. The publication was totally paid for by the advertisers, technology companies looking for engineers. They used "trap" addresses in their circulation list to catch anyone using their list. I.E., all real mail to me was full name, Norman D. Crow, but on the magazine it was N. Dale Crow. If I ever got any other mail addressed like that, I was to call.

When with NCR, we serviced the EDP system used by the American Legion. Couple years after I left Indy, found out the FBI arrived one day & hauled off the EDP Mgr. Seems he got caught selling copies of the "Legionnaire" circulation list.

[Wood Butcher]

Another option is spamgourmet.com.

provides free disposable email addresses which only work for a user specified number of messages. Anything sent to a disposable address gets forwarded to your real address. Nothing gets forwarded after the limit is reached for a particular address. It's simple to set up and really easy to use on the fly.

I've been using it for over a year now and highly recommend it.

Art

[Joe AutoDrill]

Get your own web site with unlimited forwarding capability.

i.e. myownsite.com

That way you can input the following eMail address next time, [e-mail] Anything that comes to that eMail address NOT from the source listed is obviously spam.

I do this... And as soon as I start getting spam, I automatically forward it and send it off to (in this case) [e-mail], [e-mail], etc.

[Fred the Red Shirt]

Uh, websites can forward HTTP (web traffic) but not SMTP (email).

Perhaps you mispelt 'domain'.

[rcook5]

If you do this, make sure you're not running as an open relay. I got about 2500 spams a day when that happened to me.

--RC

Sleep? Isn't that a totally inadequate substitute for caffine?

[Fred the Red Shirt]

Indeed yes.

An open relay is usually used to spam other people, not the owner of the relay. Typically a few thousand spams will pass through each day and the owner will not even be aware of it until he gets complaints or gets blacklisted.

Were those 2500 spams you got JUST bounces and complaints?

[rcook5]

No they were spams sent to non-existent addresses at my domain. I have no idea how many went to other people via that domain.

I had it set to forward all mail to the domain to my own mailbox and for various reasons I couldn't change that until I changed the hosting company.

--RC

Sleep? Isn't that a totally inadequate substitute for caffine?

[Joe AutoDrill]

Web sites cannot forward mail, but my hosting company offers free email forwarding and a number of pop3 accounts. Any of those addresses can be forwarded by me alone to where I want to forward it.

i.e. my address here is [e-mail] I get legitimate eMails through that address. However, once the spams outnumber the legitimate mails by a good number, I automatically forward [e-mail] to the FTC and start using something like [e-mail]

Nobody can spam through my site that way unless they break in, set up a list, take over a pop3 account or a redirect.

They can, of course, spoof their outgoing email address to look like it is me, but that's just smoke and mirrors.

Regards, Joe Agro, Jr.

[Fred the Red Shirt]

If it was an open server, probably a lot. At least you knew you had one. Some of the viruses spread over the last two years surrepeticiously installed open relays on unsuspecting people;s insecure windows PCs--providing the spammers with a huge supply of open relays through which to spam.

[Barry Lennox]

Me too, I have been using Spamgourmet for a long time now, and it's very handy. It proves that XYZ sold your email address and I have had a couple of interesting debates with offenders. Not much help really, but it's fun.

Barry Lennox