Track who is selling your Gmail email address

Posted by Michael
November 16, 2006

There is a nice little thing that you can do with your Gmail address (only) that can help you find out what sites have been selling your gmail address. Kudos to PCBGuy and the post they made on Hedir Review here. But here is the post if you don’t want to traverse the net to get there:

When you give your email address to a website, you hope that they don’t sell or trade your address to a bunch of spammers. Well if they do, here is a simple way to see what sites are responsible for what particular piece of email. This requires you have a Gmail account.

If your Gmail login name was username@gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username@gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom@gmail.com instead. When Gmail sees a “+” in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username@gmail.com.

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all messages that were sent to that email address.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.

I have personally tested this and it works very well! Watch out spammers!

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