Here's How Creepy Marketers Capture Your Email Address - Comments Page 1

Excellent information! Thank You! :>)

This is disturbing. Thank you so much for bringing these practices to light.

... so where are the steps I can take to protect my inbox?

I purchased an item from company online .Then several months later another company started submitting charges to my bank account through my debit card.(I had never heard of this company never mind bought from them) My bank kept cancelling my card and renewing a new one but unfortunately the payment was link attached and kept reappearing (it's taken 6 cards and my bank having to delink cards to stop this It's been 5/6 weeks now and seems to have worked.I did some checking on this company on line and found the company I purchased from had passed my details so I sent them an email saying I suspected them of having passed my details and if these payments didn't stop I would report them and take legal action for data breach...Hopefully the situation is now sorted,

Like you Bob, I have my own domain and email associated with the domain. There is the main address but I also pay for a catch-all function. So if your site asks for my email address, I give them, for example, bobrankin2[@]mydomain...
If I get an email at that address, but it doesn't come from you, well, I mark it as sp*m and delete it. I once got an email sent to a bike supply address but from another bike supply company. I called them up and it turned out that one bought the other and got their client database. Ok.
These days my legitimate email does get marked as a false positive, but for the most part, that email address works out. My gmail address otoh is a target but google does a good job of actually flagging them.
I will keep watching where I browse.
Thanks.

Good article Bob. I have an email I use for this purpose and it is set up to send received emails to junk and be deleted. If I do want to interact with a business, I use a separate email address and if the business becomes annoying, then rules send their future emails to junk. I also use a separate personnel email address for friends and relatives.

I'm a happy Ad Guard user for about a dozen years. Only $30 per year.

The question that Ernie(Oldster) asked, must be asked again:
… so where are the steps I can take to protect my inbox?

EDITOR'S NOTE: As I mentioned at the close: "You can use a disposable email address when shopping, or turn off the Location Services on your smartphone to foil some of these tactics." Other items implied would be: Avoid online games and quizzes that ask for your email, and be super cautious about clicking any links that come in your email.

This is like shopping for a car and you tell the salesman you aren't interested and they follow you home, call, text and snail mail you. If I have already told someone I don't want their product, what makes them think they bully me into it? At that point I wouldn't take it even if they're giving it away.

For this reason, but not only, I have created my own domain and have it hosted with an infinite number of email addresss. So, if I wish to provide my email address for a Bob Rankin thing, I would create a BobRankin@myprivatedomain.com and use that. If Bob Rankin ended up passing around the email address, I would simply kill that email address. I actually had one vendor refuse to accept my email address with their name - I wonder why...

This is informative, but very ironic. It seems like SafeOpt would only need your email address and that you visited a website without buying something to send an email. That's a lot less information than what is collected by ID5 Sync, AWeber, Google, or the *47* other tags that fire on askbobrankin. Looking at their website, they also don't sell information to anyone. Are you sure none of your 50 tags do?