So today I opened up my gmail account and….*GASP*….I saw my first spam email in my inbox!!!! I’m really sad. My clean gmail account has finally been infiltrated. I try really hard to limit my gmail account to personal use only. I use my girlrobot.net for most of my web signups unless I really trust the website. I have no idea how this happened.

Anyways, I read a cool new way to track where these spammers are getting your address. You know how when you sign up for something and they say your information will not be sold…is that really true? Well try this trick (only works for GMail users):

If your Gmail login name was username @ gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username @ gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom @ gmail.com instead. When Gmail sees a “+” in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username @ gmail.com.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.

Of course this doesn’t help to stop your spam infiltration but now you know which websites are shady!