How to Prevent Companies From Selling Your Email Address | EP 761

How to Prevent Companies From Selling Your Email Address

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Welcome to another episode of WP the Podcast, i’m Tim Strifler, my co-host David Blackmon is not with us today. We had some trying to get our schedules lined up and so we ran out of episodes. So i’m doing a few episode solo, and then he’ll be back with us in a few days. So and if you’re watching YouTube, apologies we’re just doing audio only uh for these few recordings without David and we’ll be back to our normal video recordings um in a few days, once David’s with us. So in today’s episode we’re talking about how to prevent companies from selling your email address. Right email spam is at an all-time high ever since the pandemic. All spam. Really i don’t know about you, but i’ve been getting so many spam phone calls and spam text messages and it is just so obnoxious. Um so i don’t have any, besides what we’ve talked about previously. I don’t have any um secret tips on getting uh spam text messages and calls to go away, but as far as emails go there is a cool. Little hack the problem is is you have to if you’re already getting the spam it might be hard to backtrack but moving forward um you can prevent companies from selling your email address. Right so you can subscribe to email addresses with confidence you can purchase things with confidence with this method knowing that you have a way of figuring out who is selling your email address and then being able to shut it down as well. And i’m not talking about creating a new email account for every company that you subscribe to. That is nonsense um but basically what you do if you’re using gmail or google suite this may work. With other ones too. I’m not sure if outlook allows us or whatever but google email is by far the most popular. So whether you have a free gmail account or you have a business domain that you’re using google email for g suite then this will work. And so what you do is whatever your email is, so uh for example me it’s Tim divilife.com Right well, if i’m gonna go and subscribe to him in a an email list. Right, because i want to learn something or whatever i could put Tim and then the plus sign and then that company’s name at divilife.com. Right so Tim plus Divi Space which is David’s company at divylife.com and then what gmail does automatically is any emails that get sent there just goes to me the plus sign and then whatever you put after it will automatically get routed to you which is really really cool. So then you know that if all of a sudden you’re getting all these random emails to your name plus whatever that company’s name is that you originally subscribed to at yourdomain.com, well then you know who who’s the guilty party. Because you only use that exact email for the company that you subscribe with, so you know your name plus company at yourdomain.com. Right, or at gmail.com if you’re using a free gmail account. So then you know who the culprit is you know, who took your email and sold it or or whatever. And so if you’re getting all these emails to that address right, and again it still all goes to your main inbox. And if that does happen, well not only can you call them out, but what you can also do is you can actually shut that down. And so there’s a few different ways you can do that. The simplest way is to create a filter,  and just send it all to spam. And then i think you could probably also bulk unsubscribe from everything that’s been on there. Um but chances are is once that’s been sold it’s been sold. So the best thing you do is just create a filter in gmail or g suite. So any emails that come in at your net name plus whatever that company email or that company is that you subscribe to then, it’ll automatically get sent straight to spam. Right you don’t have to see it and so that is how you not only figure out what companies are selling your email address, but also a way to uh get around ever having to see those emails again. And without having to create an entire new email account too. I hear that so often where people will say “oh yeah i created a new email the other one was getting so much spam” So with this method you don’t have to worry about it. But again, you kind of have to start doing this in order for it to take effect. You can’t do it retroactively. So that is it for this episode. Just a quick little tip for you. Tomorrow’s episode we’re gonna be talking about the best ways to migrate a wWordpress website. I also got a couple of my favorite tools on here and again we’ll have David back with us in a few days. Uh so until then take care bye-bye.

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09:43 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.