I have a unique method of signing up for online services that allows me to monitor usage of my email address. I’ll use the domain example.com to explain. I set up a redirect through my domain registrar giving me the ability to forward email sent to my example.com domain to an alias of my main Gmail address (email+alias@gmail.com). Then, instead of using my main email address to sign up for online services, I just create a new alias on the fly. For example, my amazon account uses amazon@example.com, my ebay account uses ebay@example.com, and so on. So, if one of my aliased emails starts receiving spam, then I know that either a spammer guessed this address by random chance or the company sold my address or mishandled my address.

I have two high profile examples. Recently, both netbank@example.com and ibd@example.com have started receiving spam. NetBank is an Internet bank that I used for about 5 years. They offered very good interest rates, but, ultimately, I closed my account because I wanted quick access to a bank’s local branch location to make deposits. The spam started before my account was closed. I contacted technical support through their secure bank mail and was told that I should close my account and start open a new one if I suspected fraud. I had specifically explained that I was not emailing them about fraud, but they apparently didn’t understand. I had directly asked them why they were giving away my email address…

My ibd@example.com alias email address just started receiving spam on October 17th. I used this address for my online trial account for Investor’s Business Daily, a very well-respected investing guide. It looks like this company either sold my address or accidentally gave it away. However, as you can tell by the subjects, at least the spam is related to stocks: “Finance.co m Watch out for this one,” “Alerts.co m Don’t waste this opportunity,” and “Quotes.co m - It will explode tomorrow.” In particular, all these stocks advertise “TAJ Systems,” (symbol TJSS), an online gaming company that “may very well be the next PartyPoker.com.” (yeah, right…)

So, as you can see, I am left to assume that both NetBank and Investor’s Business Daily mishandled or sold my email address and thereby violated their privacy policy. Mishandled or sold, the result is the same…illegal spam in my inbox (or actually spam folder because Gmail’s filtering works very well).

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 12:58 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.