Wondering where all that crap in your inbox is coming from?  It’s coming from people like this.

Here’s the full details on her “business”.

She claims that all of her lists are “opt-in”.  Given my experience with spammers, that’s usually a blatant lie.  It’s people like her who force the rest of us to take extreme measures to protect our email addresses and to eye everyone who asks for an email address with suspicion.

I create a new email address for each place that I do business with, which includes the business name and sometimes the promotion.  I examine privacy policies when I sign up for an account to see how they will use my email.  I make sure that all “opt-out” checkboxes are checked.  I don’t post my email address to newsgroups.  I mangle my email address for this web page (even before anyone knew this page existed I was getting crawled by spambots).

What I’ve found is that the majority of reputable companies are honoring my requests.  However, there are a few out there who conveniently decide to “forget” my settings and start sending me crap.  Maybe they’re thinking I’ll have forgotten about telling them not to send me stuff.  Anyway, I always tell them to stop.  If they don’t stop after a resonable amount of time I’ll stop doing business with them and then redirect all email to that address to someone in their customer service organization (or to their sales address).  When their own spam gets back to them, it seems to get their attention (or at least it worked with marketing -at- carparts.com—I’m not mean enough to post their unobfuscated address here ).