One thing that I've often wondered is how easily our email addresses proliferate as they get sold to marketers. I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to create some Hotmail disposable email addresses and I will put out each email address to one specific location to see how quickly it gets harvested or sold/shared to other sites. Part of this will be for me to identify some of these culprits of this mass marketing. By only using this email address in one website, it will be very easy to determine how the address is used across sites/marketing partners.
This would clearly be a long term project. I don't expect to get inundated with spam right away, but I am betting that I can find some sites/portals whose sole existence is to collect email addresses to sell them, so I just might stumble upon it.
Step #1 is to define my strategy - this could be interesting to see exactly how my email address is being shared.
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