Interesting new 'tool'

[dlminehart]

You could open a bunch of email accounts on hotmail or gmail, but those are all separate accounts, and you'd have to check each one for mail. The beauty of Doug's system, wherein you have an email account at your ISP, is that you can set up the account to route all the "other" mail to a single account. I.e., you have johndoe@myaccount.com and generic@myaccount.com. Your ISP's mail server can be told to automatically send anything that comes in for whatever@myaccount.com to the spamwatch@myaccount.com mailbox. You then check that account for spam. If it is addressed to "rockler@myaccount.com", you know the spammer got the address from Rockler.

Very clever, Doug!

[dkerfoot]

I will add that surprisingly few merchants have sold me out this way, so it probably isn't something someone should put a lot of effort into. (and since Rockler was used as an example I can attest they have NOT sold me out to spammers, even though I enter their Win a Tool, Win a Shop! contest nearly every day)

The best bet is to start a new "clean" account that you never use for anything except family and friends. Then use your old account (assuming it already gets spam) anytime you need to enter an e-mail address online - like to register for a contest, etc... That way you can check the "spam" e-mail only when you need to retrieve a confirmation of some sort.

The free e-mail addresses (Gmail, HotMail, Yahoo, etc) really do a great job of removing spam. Because they have so many users, it costs them a ton of money to let spam through. Also, they can easily compare and see that this same e-mail was sent to 10,000 of their users...