How to track down the rat who’s selling your Gmail address to spammers

By Digital Trends Staff May 16, 2016

Want to figure out who’s selling your email address and causing you email spam you don’t want? Have you ever started getting regular emails that you know you never signed up for? Newsletters. Deals. That kinda thing. Well it’s possible some site you did sign up for is selling your address to a third party. And that is not OK!

With a little bit of planning you can do some email tracking to see exactly who’s selling your info across the internet. Here’s what you do.

Related: Clean up your computer’s act, check out MacPaw solutions here

This only works if you’re using a Gmail email address. Let’s say your email is brian@gmail.com. Now, I have no idea who has that email address. Probably someone at Google!

Anyway, when you give your email address to any website, instead of typing brian@gmail.com, you can type in brian+website@gmail.com, where “website” is the name of whatever website you’re signing up for. Google doesn’t read the plus sign, so anything after that is irrelevant. It’ll only read the email as brian@gmail.com. So when you start getting emails you don’t want, check what email address it’s sent to. If it has the +website from a site you signed up for, but the email is from someone else entirely, you have your culprit!

Easy breezy! And now you can call yourself Sherlock Holmes! Have any tips you want to share with us? I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below, and be sure to share this video on your favorite social media site.

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