For a long time I’ve been giving a different email address to every company that I deal with. The idea behind this is to keep track of who is selling or giving away my information to third parties. For a long time, the only hit I had gotten with this was Gamefly, and that hit was only a one time thing. Apparently someone had a word document worm and it managed to go out to their customers.
But recently two otherwise legitimate companies have either lost or sold my email address.
YepRoc Records. I signed up for their mailing list way back when New Magnetic Wonder came out. That email address has not only received a deluge of spam, but been used to spend spam to others. A full 25% of the spam in my box and about 90% of what is delivered to my box is to that address. I just recently blocked it.
And for an even bigger company that has otherwise scuzzy practices and has recently been found to have sold my address….
Gold’s Gym. Not only did they butcher the address I gave them, but that butchered address has received about 500 spam messages in the past month. The only way I could tell it was them was by searching for that address in my normal mail box and realizing how they screwed up typing it in. These are also the scum that charge a $30 fee for every account you have if you are at all late on your payment… They are also the ones whose daycare I left the kid in for 1 hour, EVER, and he came home sick. If looking for a gym, do yourself a favor and look elsewhere.
And a special note to spammers…
That list of email addresses that you’re buying from that third party? You’d better hope you’re paying very little for that list, because it probably has a hundred email addresses on my domain that are utter and complete nonsense, never once used, etc. Examples? byxurdol. I wonder how they came up with that username? It received 200 spams. ezsweepskzinti… Combines a username I used a decade ago with some random nonsense up front… received 40 spams. uecgrgtdhfqbtzzfxqlllk. This one is utter nonsense… but still receives spam. They really have some useless spambots out there.