HACKER Q&A
📣 emailthrowaway2

How to deal with someone signing up email for spam?


Starting about 5 months ago, someone seems to have been signing up my email for spam. The emails:

* Have a name, but not my name. The name varies. This is why I think someone is signing me up.

* Are with real organizations. Local realtors, diet sites, dating sites, credit/debt help, unemployment help. Some are very spammy, some are legit

* Are in a manageable volume. Maybe 2-5 a day.

I don’t know who it is. Is there any way to either:

1. Find out who it is, or

2. In some way filter these emails? I use gmail

Am interested in either technical or legal measures. Currently I’m either unsubscribing or spamming the emails depending on the source, but it would be nice to stop them. They generally go to my “other” folder but not always, and in any case I usually need to process the “other” emails too.

Using a throwaway in case this person watches my account. My regular account has 10,000+ karma. Figured HN might have some ideas I hadn’t thought of.

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Legit email lists are supposed to be "double opt-in;" they are supposed to send you one message which contain a link you need to click on (or otherwise reply to) to be subscribed.

Are they bypassing that somehow?

👤 byoung2
Email is broken...there should be a built-in way to filter who can email you, and a way to block unknown senders by default.
👤 pwg
> someone seems to have been signing up my email for spam

How did you determine that this was the cause, vs. the other highly likely reason:

2) your email address has been sold, as part of a batch of millions, to scam operators who then sign everyone (including you) up to their scam lists.