When I opened my first email account in yahoo years ago, I didn’t receive that much spam as I get nowadays. Obviously one of the reasons is spammers are more active than before, but the main reason is ME. If nobody would know my email address, it wasn’t possible for them to send spam (unwanted emails). But it doesn’t mean that everyone who knows my address is sending spam. There are certain people or organisations who are sending unsolicited emails in bulk to people who have not requested for it.

I simply don’t trust anyone even not facebook in this regard. May be facebook is not spreading my address today but who knows about their future? I feel shy to say, bdjobs.com, the most popular job site in my country (Bangladesh) are continuously selling their customers (employers, students, registrants) email addresses to other people shamelessly. I unsubscribed from their site several times but seems, the more frequently I click on unsubscribe link the more they become sure that I am using that mail account actively. So they sent more emails, more frequently. It’s not nothing new that unsubscribe link is not always for unsubscribing, it’s quite often for confirming that you are actively using your account. So, before clicking on an unsubscribe link you can follow this technique like me:

Go to the site that sent you spam and find the unsubscribe page. Put your test email account (which is not registered in that site) there and wait for few days. If they are collecting/confirming email addresses through their unsubscribe link, you will receive emails in your test account in next few days. If you get email in your test account, don’t click on unsubscribe link from your original account. I often do a fun, if I find any site like this. I put their own contact us, admin or info email addresses there. I call it Return Attack.

Let’s come to the post title. How would you know, the spammer has got your address from someone you trust. For example, your email address is youremail@gmail.com. You have registered with facebook.com and twitter.com recently with this email address. However, Facebook has sold your address to a spammer. Now, when the spammer will send you spam, you exactly won’t know where she got your address from because the spammer won’t mention the seller name in the email. But this is easy to identify the seller, just use youremail+facebook@gmail.com while signing up with facebook and youremail+twitter@gmail.com with twitter. If you didn’t understand this technique at a glance, do some experiment with it.

However, this technique will fail if the seller trims Gmail addresses anything after + (plus) before selling them.