How do you know if your email address has been sold?…

Even more important — How do you know who sold your email address?…

Normally, you really don’t have anyway to know.  If you are a marketer in any online business, you certainly have given your email address to hundreds of different places.  Any one of them could have sold your email, and you don’t know who did it.

Of course, some of the time, if you have your email on your website, the dirty scoundrels that use scrappers for grabbing emails so they can spam you are the culprits.  However, you can find out if this is the case also.

Here’s a simple way to become the email sleuth…

I’ve read this in a number of sources, and I can’t remember them all, but this really does work.

Almost all email providers enable you to “tag” your email address.  You can literally put a unique identifier on your email address without changing the address.

If you are like me, you already have too many email addresses to manage, so you don’t want to make a new address each time you buy something, or create a new page on your website.

So here’s what you do…

Let’s just say – for example – your email address is suzie@yahoo.com.

You can uniquely use this email address over and over to sign up for offers, and grab the information you desire, and even make purchases.

You just type your email like this:

suzie+killeroffer@yahoo.com

Notice how I placed a tag after the actual user “suzie.”  You can make any tag you like.

Simply include a “plus sign” (+) after the email name, followed by the tag of your choice.  In the example above, I made the tag “killeroffer.”  You can make it anything you want.

So if you sign up for TrafficStarterPro, you might make your email something like this:

suzie+trafficstarterpro@yahoo.com

Then, if I sold your email (which there isn’t any way in hell I would do that), then you would know.  But remember, you must keep the tag unique for the site you submitted.  Making it match the offer makes it easy for you to know where it got sold from.

What action you take, I leave that completely up to you.

- Wayne Sharer