SubnetSurfer — “Not all who wander are lost.”

You are getting inundated with spam since you entered your email address on some site, and you are thinking “now what?”. It’s pouring in from free-this and weekly-that and you click unsubscribe and it keeps coming in. Well, this is my method for solving spam problems.

Most spammers protect their address lists like chunks of gold. They constantly trim and add to it, they try to get meta data to go with it and they try their hardest to send you something that interests you with a link you will click on, and make them rich. One thing they are generally not interested in is history. Historical data is not important to them and I capitalize on this.

Next time you get UCE (I am referring to actual emails form nasty companies, not V1@grA SPAM), find the “Update Email Address” or “Change Options”, (either from a link in the email or in the headers) and go to it. Make yourself a nice false identity, complete with a mathematically real address (a valid street, valid zip code, etc) and then fire up Google and find yourself a temporary email address. Update your preferences with a temporary address, wait a few minutes in case there is a “confirm change of address” email sent, and voilà!

Spammers don’t generally maintain “Old Email Addresses” (I mean they are not actually trying to be a CRM) so you have now just taken yourself off their list without taking yourself off their list :) It’s not a complete solution, but I know from experience that this works…