Combating spam with your Gmail ID
Did you know that Gmail doesn’t recognize dots (.) as characters within a username ? This means th1nk.dj[at]gmail.com is the same as th1nkdj[at]gmail.com for Gmail servers. OK, Great .. Now how’s that useful for me ?
_
We signup for tons of services a day, right from that online news subscription to that no-so-trusted site which said it needed your email ID to send the download link you just requested. Hmm.. what to do ?
Well, for the not-so-trusted sites, just use an email alias with a pre positioned DOT. 
Take this example. I have to give my email ID [th1nk.dj[at]gmail.com] to blogdirectories.com. But I suspect them on giving the email IDs to 3rd party services. So, I give my email ID as th1nkd.j[at]gmail.com and I get the confirmation link.
Now, I goto Gmail > Settings > Filter and create a filter for all mails with TO: containing “th1nkd.j[at]gmail.com” to go to the trash OR apply a label. That way, I can find out which site gave out my email ID to the gazillion spammers out there.
Now that is scary. What if someone had an id say [email protected].
He would be getting my emails too. Have you actually tried this out ?? I can understand the spam folder. But why dont you get two such ids and check it out?
Wouldn't it just be easier to make a second (FREE, thanks to Gmail) address such as [email protected]? Then you could use that as the address to put on websites, etc.
nice nice! 😀 i should have chosen a good username before. so if i create [email protected] it could also be [email protected]? cool!
Hmm .. yeah ! But then you'll have to log in and out of the accounts..
@ Ganesh
No dude ! Since gmail doesnt count the (.) , bot.hack, b.o.t.hack, bothack are all ACTUALLY “bothackâ€, which is unique. No one else can make that ID with (.) in b/w ..
Rest assured !
Cheers
You can also try [email protected]. Everything after the plus-sign is ignored, and you can use it to filter stuff too.
wow.. nice one! cheers 😉
unfortunately this does not work to stop spam, nor does the +keyword trick mentioned in the comments… the reason it doesn’t work is simple – all the information a person needs to extract the true gmail address is available in these aliases you’re creating… it’s trivial to reverse the obfuscation – in fact it’s trivial for a program to reverse the obfuscation, and since the tricks are so well known and gmail is so popular it’s virtually guaranteed that the email harvesters have already automated this task…
I just tried myself. It's really good.
Thanks for Sharing. 🙂
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You can't hack gmail. That is b.s. My computer guy said it isn't possible. [email protected] LOL
personal and business computers doesn't need to have similar characteristics
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