How to trace where your letters are coming from

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Wannabe Baiter Joined: 16 Mar 2006 Posts: 91

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 [email protected] and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering [email protected] as your email, enter it as [email protected] 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 [email protected].

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all massages 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.

Neat! Very Happy

Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 6:42 pm

Good Tip.

I just tried this by sending an email to <Myname>[email protected] It works.
I always wondered how I could see who was spamming me without using separate email accounts.

Thanks

Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 6:56 pm

Actually when you specify the addresses like that it gets treated as a distribution list at Gmail so if you specify an address such as:

[email protected]

when the sender tries to send to that address it will be delivered to

[email protected]
and
[email protected]

so depending on what you put as the second part, you could end up signing up someone else to receive your Emails, which could be a real problem if there's anything confidential in there (like online shopping).

BTW you can specify more than two recipeints, e.g.
[email protected]

Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 7:32 pm

Apparently two people are claiming the "+" sign does two different things.

Will one of you provide proof of what you say is true.

I personally doubt gmail would set up the "+" sign as a distribution list as it would be too easy to unknowingly spam gmail accounts but I have been wrong before. And I have seen reports of different uses of the "+" sign.

Added:
I searched around and found a page that describes using the "+" as an extension to the name before the "+" sign. It apparently is an old feature of the original email specification and continued by google.
I did not find any references to the second poster's claim of it being used as a list.

Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 8:17 pm

Try it, send an Email to two of your Gmail addys
(that's what I did to test it).

[EDIT] Actually I might be talking b0ll0cks (& not for the first time !) It could be that the rules I've got in Evolution made it look like the test mail I sent got delivered twice. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has tried this and what result they got.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 01 Sep 2006 Posts: 11

Just tested it, it only got delivered to the mailbox specified by the first word. So, it seems like the op was correct.

Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 9:53 pm

I just tried this, and got the email only to the first address. The second account, the one I wrote after the + sign didn't recieve anything.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

I've been baiting for ages with two characters using the same gmail account:
[email protected]
[email protected]
It works fine; it's not a distribution list.

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