I came across this interesting article about how many companies (some of them household names as well, including Aviva, Sainsbury’s & Tesco’s, according to the article) use devious methods to continue sending us spam.
There seems to be no way round it.
My tip for dealing with it is to have multiple email addresses using certain ones specifically for companies that I think my spam.
I also use Gmail as a key account. Useful because it has a pretty good spam filter but it also filters email that gets through into different categories. So promotional emails get filtered into their own category and don’t clog up the Primary Inbox.
Another way I deal with signing up for newsletters & keep a track of who the email is shared with is to add a unique identifier to the email address.
So for example if I sign up to Aviva to get an insurance quote I will use the following email address
myname+aviva@gmail.com
The email will still come into myname@gmail.com but by adding +aviva it in effect tags the email.
Aviva will see my email address as being: myname+aviva.com.
If I get an email form someone other then Aviva using the email address I know that Aviva has passed my email on to a 3rd party.
If I specifically did’t allow this when signing up with Aviva then they are in breach of the Data Protection rules.
The article goes into this in more depth about how they make it hard/confusing to understand what we are signing up for in the first place.
Have a read –
Source Reading:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/the-tricks-companies-use-to-keep-spamming-you/
