Everyone gets spam, it’s become an integral part of the web and a way for many individuals to earn money much to the chagrin of most users. Wouldn’t it be great if you could find out how the spammers got your email address?
Well you can do just that through the use of the + symbol.
There are many special characters that trip up email address’s and the internet in general when used in place of simple text, as a result many sites have added validation to their email forms that may prevent this method from working for you (there’s no harm in trying though!).
When a machine reads your email address it sees {user}@{domain}, if you happen to add a + symbol then it ignores everything after that symbol it until it gets to a symbol it recognizes, you can use this to your advantage by adding notes or messages after the {user} part of your email address.
Whenever you sign up for a web-service or newsletter add their web address into your email address so it would look like {user}+website.com@{domain}, this won’t affect the delivery of the message (it will still get to you), but you will be able to track where they originally got your email address from.
Adding a + to an email address
This works great for newsletters & static mailers, but be wary of using it on services that require you log in with your email address as you’ll need to remember to include the + symbol and the domain you originally used. (as long as you come up with your own standard for how to write email address’s using this method you’ll be fine.)
While this helps you track where people originally found your email address, it won’t stop the email getting through, it’s nice to be able to see where they got your email address though!
