Find Who Is Abusing Your Gmail Address
When I got my email address with Google, I was very careful in giving the id to others. This was because I had experience with other id’s which were under heavy attack of spammers. I used to get more than 100 spam emails a day. So it was very clear that someone who you trusted, abused the email id. Although many sites promise that they will not spam you, I have seen that many of them do that in practice. Also, they sell your email id. This happened with my Google email id also. I am receiving a lot of spam mails now.
I wanted to find the culprits who abuse the email id and sell my email id. Google provides a nice way to find them, if you are a bit careful while giving your email id to someone else – use an address alias. What is an address alias? From Google’s help:
Gmail doesn’t offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.
You can set up filters to automatically direct these messages to Trash, apply a label or star, skip the inbox, or forward to another email account.
So when you signup for example.com, provide your email id as username+example@gmail.com. When you receive a spam email, you can check the to id. If it shows that username+example@gmail.com, then you can be sure that it was sold to spammers by example.com. So you can setup a filter to delete all the emails to username+example@gmail.com, so that such spam mails do not land in your inbox.
So, what is the catch?
- This will work only for signups, you do from now onwards. But it is still better than having nothing.
- This is a simple trick and spammers can filter their email ids with ‘+’ sign and get the original email id. But this will work till spammers update their filters
Let me know if you know any better methods to keep the spam under control.
Moving from WordPress to Blogger
When I started this blog, I considered a lot of options to host my blog. I decided that I will not use Blogger, just because I wanted to something different and wanted more things under my control. But after two and half years, I think that I should move my blog back to Blogger.com. I will explain my reasons and the way I am going to do that, since that change can not happen overnight because of various reasons.
First, let me explain why I am moving to blogger.com when everyone else is doing the other way round. The primary reason is that I want to get rid of the administrative overhead. I do not want to manage the server and the blogging platform. There are so many updates to both WordPress and plugins coming out, that I do not get time to update and manage things. Secondly, I needed to make sure that the servers are up and running all the time – I have tried all the options for web hosting over a period of time – from simple shared hosting to reseller hosting to VPS. Each time I had to think of the quality of the hosting service, their uptime and above all, I am paying for all those stuff. In short, I was paying to waste my time, though it remains a fact that I have learnt a lot of things in the process.
Now that I have decided to move, I need to make some changes and be prepared to inform search engines that I have moved, without losing any traffic from them. Since most of my traffic comes from search engines (around 70%), I need to make sure that I do not lose it. Major hurdle in such a change is the permalinks. I was using a custom permalink in WordPress, which is not supported by Blogger. Luckily, WordPress has nice feature to accomplish that – it will automatically redirect ( 301 Permanent redirect ) from the old permalink to new one. But it will take some months for the search engines to update those, and till that time I will continue to use WordPress. I have already updated the url scheme, with new structure. If you are planning to move to blogger.com, please let me know – I will be glad to help you.
One big complaint I have about WordPress is that it has so many features. It is no more a simple blogging platform. Some people like it, some doesn’t.
If you have any suggestion, please let me know.
I got a telemarketing call on the day when I activated my mobile connection. I do not know how all these information is reaching telemarketers. To stop these calls you should register with National Do Not Call Registry or with your telephone service provider. They will give you a registration number and all the telemarketing calls should stop within 45 days. I registered in this registry the very same day, I got the number activated.
Sad, I am still getting calls though, the frequency has reduced. Today also, I got a call from someone. I asked the caller where did they get my number from. They say that my number is there in their database. Next, I asked them for their details — which company she is working for. She handed over the call to someone else, who says that all those information is ‘personal’. How can the name of the company be personal? When I repeated the question, he hung up the call.
I filed a complaint with my telephone operator. You need to give them the number from which you got the call, date and time and details of the call. The call which I got was from someone who was doing marketing for a bank. My operator has given me a complaint number and assured me that they will take an action by 5th February, 2010. Let me see what happens.
I do not know how many people ‘enjoy’ such commercial calls. All the numbers in India should be added to NDCR and people who are willing to receive such calls should be able to remove their number from registry and receive the call. Telecom operators should also look into the big issue — how these numbers reach a telemarketer?