Hunting Down The Real Emails Of Those Who Use Junk Addresses?
from the that-doesn't-seem-right dept
It's pretty common, at this point, for most people to have their "junk email" address. That's the email address you use whenever you have to register for anything online. You know it's going to get spammed, but you rarely check it, or once it gets too bad, you just ignore it completely and get another junk email address to use instead. Simple enough. If marketers were smart (stop laughing), they'd recognize just how little value someone's email address is for this very reason. Instead, we see them doing things like setting up tradeoffs if you choose to not let them spam you. However, it would appear that Miller Brewing has gone one step further, if a post on Boing Boing is to be believed. According to that post, someone who used a junk email address to register for something having to do with the beer company, later received an email at their regular email address, saying that Miller couldn't reach them at the old email address, so they had tracked the person down, and changed the email address for them. In other words, there may actually be people associated with Miller Brewing trying to hunt down your real email address, if you ever gave them a junk one. They then provide an opt-out if the person doesn't want to keep receiving messages. It would be nice if there were a little more evidence that this was happening for real -- but, if it's true, then it's more ridiculous marketer short-sightedness, designed more to harm a brand in the long run. Update: Brian McWilliams has some more details on what's going on here. Apparently, Equifax used to have a spamming operation, which they claimed they shut down right before CAN SPAM went into effect... however, this seems to be associated with the domains owned by that company. Remember, this is the same Equifax who recently said it was un-American for you to know what Equifax knew about you.
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constant contact
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Doh! Re: constant contact
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epending happens all the time
There are many companies that provide such services. Returnpath.com is one of these companies, though they are slightly less sneaky then the competition. Take a look at the left side of their landing page. They are also the company that gets your email addresses if you fill in and old and new address on the USPS change of address form as well as having data submitted via various websites. Some website forms across the net that ask for email address for marketing purposes will also contain a field for old email addresses with the Return Path logo next to it.
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From the returnpath website
Ha!
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Most likely
boozer+millertime@example.com
So perhaps all Miller did was change that to boozer@example.com? That would be easy for someone to automate. I can't imagine that humans would be employed to find someone's new email address.
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Probably a misunderstanding
From looking at the story then, my only conclusion was that the person that reported this actually reads their SPAM email. Spammers are notorious for lying. Why bother reading it?
I'm not personally going to lose any sleep that there might be some dumb lackies working to track every participant in a sweepstakes in order to make their lives miserable.
If the email looks like SPAM and is from somebody I have no interest in dealing with, it will get tossed into my Junk folder and my bayesian filter will do all the work--I'll never see another message from them again.
So... what's the big deal?
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I've done this
But I think it's too expensive for spammers - don't they pay less than one cent per new address?
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No Subject Given
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Mailinator
It's a real address, so it works, and I usually use bogus information for the rest of the fields anyway...
Chris.
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Re: Mailinator
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Re: Mailinator
I used to sign up for free stuff online. Before I knew it, I was getting slammed by spam. I just have to rely on Spam Assasin now.
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Bugmenot.com
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Re: Bugmenot.com
http://www.searchenginez.com/reverse_email.html
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