spam tagging

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I hate when you give one company your contact info and they sell it to someone else. One of the techniques I use is to tag my info per company so I can tell when/if it gets sold to someone else.

See a real example here.

Here is how you can do this; let's say you are Andy Griffith <andy@example.com> and you live at 12 Main St., Mayberry, NC, and you are buying stuff from Amazon.com.

Email Tagging

Give Amazon the email address andy+amazon@example.com.

Any email address which contains a + before the @ is supposed to be passed on as written but ignoring everything from the + to just before the @.

In some cases, the programmers who write the various software used by your vendor might not know about this convention, and they might reject an email address with a + in it.

This is a bummer.

If you want an email tagging solution which will work every time, you need to get your own domain name (e.g., andy.example.com) and then use a different email for each vendor like this: amazon@andy.example.com. If you want to try this, ask one of your geek friends how to set this up.

Yet another method is to use an email service such as Yahoo Plus which can setup tagged addresses for you, although this is not quite as convenient as having your own domain, since with your own domain there is zero setup to using a new tagged email address for each vendor.

Street Address Tagging

Give Amazon this shipping address:
Andy Griffith
12 Main Street
Amazon.com
Mayberry, NC

In almost all cases you can in fact enter the name of the company in your second line address. This way if you start to get catalogs from someone else, but with Amazon.com in your second line, you know Amazon sold your contact info.

I find it is easier to do this online than with an operator on the phone, since they get confused, but with some humor you can usually convince them to enter the second line tag for you.

In the cases where there is no second line address available, you could try:
12 Main St Apt AMZ

In the extremely rare case that isn't allowed, you can then try to use a different middle initial for each vendor, but that of course doesn't work too well if you have a lot of companies you deal with. :)