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"Guarding email"
12/23/2002 Entry
As you may know from previous entries, I am quite concerned about keeping my email spam free and I think about ways in which I can avoid getting on spam lists. Unfortunately, no matter how careful you are others can land you on lists despite their best of intentions.
The only thing I can do in such cases is not respond to the messages. So if I receive an invitation via evite or another such service I will try to respond but only if it does not require registration. I have recently received some messages from SomeoneLikesYou.com and as cute as that game may be, I am not going to register. (The idea of that site is interesting although pretty faulty. You can put in the name of someone you have a crush on and they will be sent an email. To find out whether you had sent the note to them, they have to go to the site and enter your name as one of their crushes. But how many crushes is a person going to have? Somehow I have a feeling people just type in the names of people they know because curiosity pushes them to guess who had sent them the original note regardless of how many crushes one may have to enter in order to get a match in the end. You only find out who sent you the initial note if you also list them as a crush.)
Of course, many of these sites will tell you that they do not sell their mailing lists. I don't trust such disclaimers. For one thing, I suspect selling and sharing or trading are two different things. Perhaps sites simply trade lists with other sites without any monetary compensation such not qualifying to be called "selling". Even if they don't do that, they may still change policies one day either because they feel like it or because they are acquired by a different company that does sell lists. And so I don't use my primary address on commercial sites ever.
I thought I'd at least post a note here and ask that if anybody signs me up for anything or lists me on any commercial site please do not use my Princeton address (or any other official address I'll be acquiring in the future). Instead, sign me up using eszter _at_ eszter _dot_ com. That poor address is completely spammed out already, one more sign up won't hurt it yet I will still get the information, eventually.
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