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[cmptch]

About 2 years ago I embarked on an experiment. I have been submitting an e-mail address to as many websites (advertisement related) as possible, while maintaining my personal security.

For the past two weeks, my E-mail address has reached more companies than I would want to count. The e-mail host does not filter ligitimate advertising. I've been getting roughly 50 e-mails a day. My experiment is about to pay off.

Yesterday began to unsubscribe to all these unwanted programs. I am not keeping an accurate count, but I have unsubscribed about 100 e-mails. They all pretty much told me it would take 10 days to delete my address. Today I have recieved 5 e-mails.

I don't expect to completely kill all the advertisements, however, I do expect to reduce them significantly.

I certainly hope this works, so that I can begin to reuse my oldest and favorite e-mail address.

[Repr]

in the old days (not as long ago as it sounds) i used to subscribe to things that seemed interesting and started to recieve more and more junkmail from all kind of stuff. after 2 years this is the picture

i unsubscribe on regular bases. this is about every 2 months. when im done i get about 2-3 junk mail each day. in 2 months time this goes up to 10-20, the moment where i start to unsubscribe again. and then all over again. once you start you need a very good junk mail filter, one that blocks junk but doesnt delete or block mail you actually do want. this is nearly impossible, becouse some subscriptions i made are still ones that i want, but are blocked anyway.

will i ever get get rid of all junk? not a chance. 1 junkmail subscribes you to another and another and another, untill there is no way you can actually get rid of all the junk.

[punkin8tor]

good luck w/ that! the only way I was able to get rid of spam completely was by accident. I clicked on the wrong thing that made it so I couldn't get into my e-mail account any more. So I opened up a new one and don't give that address to anyone but people I know. It is wonderful... now all the e-mail I get there is what I want to see!

[Luke]

I use a free hotmail account when I subscribe to websites. Apart from the regular emails from these websites I have only ever had one item of junk mail in four years. I think it's because I chose a very odd email address... so non-conformity is a pretty good junk mail filter!

[Ben Last]

I have to agree with Luke, if you're signing up for an email account anywhere adding extra characters into you email address seems to stop a lot of spam where spammers are just guessing email addresses.

Characters such as underscores or numbers seem to work well, so rather than just mailto:johnsmith@provider.com try john_c_smith@com or john_54_smith instead.

...and of course, dont ever give your email address away!

[cmptch]

true enough, as I said, it's an experiment to see how well it works. I'll be updating for about 2 weeks to see how well of a job it did. In a 24 hour period, I haven't received a single e-mail.

[edit] 70 hours since last mail.

[cmptch]

5 emails since my last update on 8 Jun 2006. those were companies that I had missed before.