Hey everybody! Guess what? Yet another company, SchoolNews.com has sent my email address of to the dark world of spammers. What happened last week with another company has happened again: A unique-to-that-company-only email address I used for their site has ended up being used to send spam to me.
Congratulations SchoolNews, you been busted for selling my email address.
SchoolNews has been selling my email address to spammers, even though their privacy policy says they won’t do that. But this company is special because they make it almost impossible to contact them — and then they don’t respond when you do get through.
And, as before, I know they’re part of my spam problem because I’ve got a secret and sneaky trick to track companies that do this. OK, it’s not so secret or sneaky but it sounded really good, didn’t it?
As for SchoolNews, I’ve sent a message to their “contact us” page but have gotten no response. The age seems to be more about changing your password than actually contacting them. And their “privacy” policy is very skimpy. It reads:
* SchoolNews.com has created this privacy policy to ensure users of our commitment to privacy.* SchoolNews.com will not disclose membership information collected to anyone other than visitors to the site that directly look at information posted by registered users.
* SchoolNews.com collects information from you during the registration process… Name, email address, school, year of graduation, etc. SchoolNews.com uses this information to contact you regarding the status of your membership when you join and then subsequently to notify you of updates to our service. We also provide options for getting additional updates such as when reunion postings are made, people are added to your class, etc. These additional updates are membership options that can be changed at any time after joining. We also may use the information collected to customize your experience at our site. Please review our terms of use for additional information regarding our membership and rules.
Don’t believe any of it. SchoolNews is yet another company that you should watch out for. As I’ve said before, if they have no problem doing it to me they’ll certainly have no problem in helping to spam you. They should fix the problem, and address it by responding to me.
That Sneaky Tracking Thing I Do
A refresher on how I track this companies: How do I know that SchoolNews is doing this? Very simple. I keep track of every website I register at, using its own unique email address, and it’s pretty simple and painless to do.
And, how, you ask, do I track these guys with a unique email address, in a simple way? I know who/what company is spamming me and where they got my email address from, because each address that I use to register on a website is unique and identifiable to that website. For SchoolNews, I originally registered using an address similar to this:
schoolnews@timsfakedomain
When SchoolNews sells my information, and it’s used to send me “legitmate” emails from legitimate companies, the emails come addressed to me at schoolnews@timsfakedomain. And this must be lucrative for SchoolNews, or why would they do it?
Setting Up Your Own Secret Sneaky Email Tracking
To get this tracking system up and running, I simply set up a domain (let’s say I used timsfakedomain.com, then I set up a “slush” email account under that domain that forwards all email that comes into it – no matter who the front end of the email is addressed to – to my actual, real email account. This is done by setting my new domain to send any mail onward, using the universal symbol for “all” – an asterisk.
It looks something like this: Forward “*@timsfakedomain” to “timsrealemail@timsrealdomain”.
(You’ll notice that I’m not listing real domains or email addresses here, because of… well, you guessed it, spambots and other things that might try to scrape an email address from this posting.)
Thus, when I get an email from, oh say, the Products Supersite, asking if I need “medication to improve my performance” but it’s addressed to schoolnews@timsfakedomain, I know exactly where it was sold/rented/stolen/given away from.
It’s pretty simple, once you set it up, and then it’s kind of fun to see who spams you.
Now, if only I could get SchoolNews to actual follow their privacy policy – or even acknowledge my complaints, then I’d be a little lighter in the spam inbox.
Do you have any stories about this?
There are email retaliation companies that you can subscribe to for free that use their own tactics against themselves. Once you create a rule in your outlook, you can automatically fire a trigger email to the service that will send a massive email bomb to the originating server… careful though… I had this setup to send if any received email had “canadian”, “prescription” and “low cost” in it… my father forwarded me a terrible joke that included these three phrases and yahoo ended up shutting off my father’s email.
My bad.
This has nothing to do with schoolnews.com, however it is a similarly related story. I’m a dot mac member, however I recently signed up for gmail (for I have to pay $100 a year for apple’s email service). Literally within the first three hours of signing up for gmail (and, mind you, without sending an email from said gmal address), I received the stereotypical deposed-king from Africa email, promising millions of dollars if I do this and this and that. Within THREE hours.
It’s simply disappointing that these companies make a mockery of their own promises to their customer base.
-Kelly Q.