Topic awaiting preservation: Stop Giving Out Your Friends' Information!

Holy fuck, people, stop signing your friends up for crap! This idiocy gets me so pissed off.

Despite my explicitly telling a friend of mine never to enter my e-mail address on any Web site, she's gone and signed up at Tenspot and entered my e-mail address! I just got one of their "Hey, your friend X signed you up so you could both win $10,000,000!" e-mails. (Here's a rant with some info on TenSpot.)

Where do you think they get the money to give out on these things? They sell your information to third parties!

ARRGHHHH!! This was a fresh address I created just a few months ago that I was only giving to people I thought I could trust.

Of course, the e-mail I got included a link to this page that allows me to enter my address to be blocked. I'm split on whether or not to enter it. I know the rule is not to do it because some people use it just to verify an address, but hell, they already have it. Should I take a chance?

is there already any mechanism ( such as offsite image, iframe, script, ... ) in spam you received that may have already confirmed the validity of your email ? If no, well, like you said they already have your email so it could hardly be worse if you take a go at their mail_preference form.

I feel your pain, and I assume you know you're just venting and realize that the crusade is hopeless?!

I've *just* finally got my mom to stop sending me e-cards from every weird little site she finds.

quote:

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Should I take a chance

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I never do for the reason you stated



(Edited by JKMabry on 02-04-2005 18:30)

Actually you may try to create a fake account, register it on Tenspot, and try the mail_preference with it to see if any spam gets in in ~1 week.

I'm pretty sure its value would be higher when its a comfirmed email address.

Yeah I hate it when that happens!!!

BTW Wes, I have some gmail invites if you wanna have another go at making a clean email account.

Wes,

I'm not familiar with tenspot, but if they are like the other opt-in sites I've seen, they will actually take your e-mail address off their list if you enter it into the unsubscribe form. The problem you may have is that the other places they have sold your e-mail address to may not be as nice.

I signed up on an opt-in mail list last month without realizing how much mail it would generate. Within two days I removed my name from their list and spent the entire month of January going to the unsubscribe forms on all the places they sent my e-mail address to. Most of them took my name off their list within two days some took as long as a week.

One of them persisted for two weeks. After unsubscribing half a dozen times, I was still getting mail from with their return address mangled to disguise it from my spam blocker. I went to their site found the form for sending a message to their support staff and informed them that I had unsubscribed multiple times and I would be reporting any further e-mails from their site to every spam reporting agency I could contact. I haven't received another e-mail from that site.

I did get two more e-mails from a different place around the end of January, but they desisted when I unsubscribed. I know that all of these came from the same signup because I used a unique e-mail address that I only gave to that one site and that is the address all the other places were using.

I would recommend that you go ahead and unsubscribe and do it as quickly as possible to stop the dissemination of your e-mail address.



.

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

wow... I haven't received spam since I got Gmail....

neither gmail nor my AKO account *ever* get spam..

*signs Petskull up for some "dubious" mail*

Hehe...

OK, so I've heard about Gmail, but since I manage my own domains and e-mail addresses, I didn't pay any attention. What's all the hoopla?

I've sent you an invite Wes so you can try it Yo self.

:::tao::: ::cell::
"Those who look for monsters should look to it that they do not become monsters.
For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you"

[edit] Well I tried but just got an auto response saying you no longer use that addy, but the offer is still there if you want Wes [/edit]

(Edited by Tao on 02-06-2005 20:41)