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How Are These Companies Getting My Email Address?
A company can give your email address to an affiliate of theirs when you give it out, but that is not the only way that a company can get your email address. These days, companies are getting smarter in their efforts to attain email addresses. Here are some of the ways that companies are getting a hold on your inbox.
Personal Homepages
Just about everyone has a homepage of their own these days. Almost every internet service provider (ISP) offers you a place to put up your own website. The problem behind this is that when you do put up your website, you often feel obligated to leave your contact information.
This is not a very good idea if you are looking to avoid spam because you have just advertised your email address. A resourceful person will take down your information so that they can spam you later.
It is rare that anybody thinks that they can receive spam simply from putting out their contact information, but it is the easiest way to do it. Spammers can easily gather all of your information by using what is called “Harvesting Software”.
Harvesting software is basically a program that searches the internet for the @ symbol. In searching for it, they recognize that this is likely an email address and therefore it leaves you open to receive their spam. Most of the time, spammers are unaware if the email address is even active or used at all. That is why they can put out so many of them.
By harvesting as many of the addresses that use the @ symbol, spammers are basically guessing that at least 50,000 emails they send out of 1,000,000 of them will be viable. In most cases, regular people like you prove them right by responding to them.
Once you reply to one of the spam that you receive, you have announced to them that they can continue to send you email. You should know that they will often report your email address to other companies and their affiliates which will only lead to your receiving even more spam.
Registration Forms
Whenever you are interested in signing up for a service online, you would serve yourself better not to leave your email address unless you are certain that you want to receive news and product announcements from that company.
Nearly all registration forms that you fill out can lead to spam. That is why these companies ask you to fill out registration forms. Some companies leave you with the option of receiving emails and notices from them. You should always read the fine print of a registration form before you submit it.
There is usually a box that you can check if you do not wish to receive emails from the company or its affiliates. If you do not wish to receive them, you should be certain to check that box. If that box doesn’t exist, then you may want to forget the registration all together, just to be sure.
Of course, it is common for some companies to place the option on receiving emails or not and still send you emails. That is why you should always check the privacy policy of the company first. It is the law that all companies let you know whether or not they share your information with others. It is also common for people to ignore the privacy policy information.
That is why you should always read through it.
It does take some extra time on your part to go through these policies, but you can save yourself the effort of having to go through and delete spam, which is more annoying. By not going through the privacy policy, you are playing roulette with your inbox.
This registration spam also applies when you are registering a new piece of software. After you have installed the software, there is often the task of registering. Many of the companies tell you that registering it is so that you can be informed of any product upgrades for that software. But you should know that they are also used to send you every other notice about their company as well. If you don’t want to receive this type of information, you have to refuse the registration process.
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