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Title:Email Privacy and Violators
Date:March 26th, 2004
Self Righteous:2
Opinionated:2
Simply true:10

Why Am I Reading This?

If I sent you this URL, it's because you submitted my email address to a website. This page explains why I'd rather you didn't do that and explains what to do instead.

Why I hate SPAM

I receive about 100 email a day. Most of it is spam. 2005 was particularly spammy, I received over 40 million lines of SPAM, in over 700,000 messages, that was about 1.7 Gigabytes of my bandwidth used up for this crap, almost 2000 messages per day.

I despise SPAM, and if there was legislation pending that would implement capital punishment for SPAMmers, I would literally support it.

What I do about it

I'm very protective of my main email address. Please don't ever type my email address into a website, with the sole exception of people who send/receive email through web sites like hotmail. If you want to add me to a website that requires my email, even things like evite, please ask me first (I use a different email for each website), or at least make up an unusual email address at my domain.

I also use a Contact form on my website (from a script that I wrote) so that I don't have to put my email on my website.

Furthermore, I have a custom spam filter that I wrote in perl using my extensible mail filter

Finally, everytime I submit my email to a website, I use a different email address. This lets me easily filter out addresses that are sold, and, more importantly, lets me track who is selling my email. Which leads to:

More Venting About SPAM

SPAM is a huge waste of time and is very costly. My time is wasted deleting spam. My time is wasted writing tools to deal with this problem. Real people have trouble receiving email from real people because of overzealous SPAM filters. My download connection is slowed down greatly because of it. I've seen many services destroyed by spam (such as the triumph_cars yahoogroups I belonged to until it got spammed out of existence). SPAMmers have no respect for life or property.

Violators

Here is a list of domains that have sold my email address (or who've had their systems compromised and had their mailing list stolen - it's all the same to me, it's their job to protect my private information): And companies that did not do a thorough job of protecting my email: And finally, companies who kept mailing me after multiple unsubscribe attempts: Companies who ignored their own "No contact via email" settings: