How to find out who lied to you about your privacy
We are protected by lots of laws against people misusing our personal information, which in practise means spamming us. But the problem is – it’s very annoying when someone sends you spam, but how can you ever know which of the hundreds of web sites you have given your email address to and clicked the “do not use my address to send me marketing information” didn’t keep their promises?
Here’s how: all you need is control over a space of email addresses (which you will usually get if you manage your own domain/web space). Then you need to set up your email settings so that any email sent to your domain but to an unknown address gets forwarded to a predetermined box. For example you can set it up so that if someone types in xxads12123@gilestv.com, it gets forwarded to spamcatcher@gilestv.com. Then – now here’s the clever bit – whenever you sign up to a web site, you put the name of the company in the email address you give. For example spammercom_1@gilestv.com. Then if you need to collect a password or something, just go to spamcatcher@gilestv.com and pick it up. After that, keep an eye on your box and see how many of them keep their promise. The “to” address in the emails in your spamcatcher box will give away the source of the offending mail. Then if you can be bothered, you can even sue them. Or if you can be less bothered, you could report them to the register of spammers
If your mail server doesn’t have a default address (most do), you can acheive the same thing by adding a series of rules “if TO doesn’t contain x, forward to spamcatcher” for all names in your list of addresses (a bit of a pain I know, but….)