CATEGORIES
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- WEB TECH JOBS
- YAHOO
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
- ADRIAN CHAN
- ALICIA NAVARRO
- ALLEN STERN-EDITOR
- CORSIN CAMICHEL
- DARREN HERMAN
- HANK WILLIAMS
- MARK DAVIS
- RICK TUROCZY
- SANFORD DICKERT
- SHANNON CLARK
When good ideas go bad... harvesting emails by merchant
I had my car washed this week at an automatic car wash. I love when the lights come on as the car goes through so you really know you are getting the hot wax. While waiting for them to clean my 20s, I noticed a computer they had on a desk near the other air fresheners.
Wow, if I give them my email, they will give me 50% off a car wash. Considering the best wash is $35, this is a great savings. So I started to type into the box. Then I noticed something. They are collecting the emails via Microsoft Excel. Not only that, but the entire list was accessible for me. About 500 email addresses it said this week. From what I could tell, getting these names onto my keychain USB drive would have taken maybe 15 seconds.
Check my pics below (sorry for quality from cell) to see the screens.
That's why I have multiple email accounts. One to use in circumstances such as this carwash incident where I know there will be Spam and another for my 'serious' emails :)
What you can do, and this could be a double edged sword, is create a global email forward for your domain. So, that means anything sent to your domain will be forward to a location you desire.
What this is good for. So, say you gave them (the car wash) an email called 'carwash@mydomains.com'. You would receive their email. However, if someone starts spamming that address, you simple go to your filter settings are reject everything from 'carwash@mydomains.com'. This makes it nice because you can tell which retailers sold or spammed you and block them and you don't have to setup individual email forwards every time.
The bad side. A lot of these random spammers send out spam to stupid email addresses. So, lets say they send spam to "4ffHG34b@mydomains.com', it would be forwarded because of the global email forward. Since most of these addresses are made up and random, its hard, if impossible to block, if your domain is the target of spammers with a global email forward.
If your hosting company has Grey Listing available for your emails, I highly recommend it. It has cut down on 95% of my spam. I love it.
P.S. I would have taken the list and tried to sell them car wash supplies... j/k :)
Yea - that would be fun "your email was sold to use by xyz car wash, we know you are interested in keeping your car clean, how about purchasing 10 years of car washes at our center in north canada.
you can also use spamgourmet.com