Here is a simple trick that I use when adding my email to newsletters to find out if people are selling my data or if they’re adding me to other lists I didn’t subscribe to. Let’s find out who’s spamming you.

If you’re like me, you use Gmail as your personal inbox, and your Gmail might look a little something like mine. I have 35,000 unread emails in my personal Gmail account. And the reason why is you sign up for one email newsletter and sure you want it, but it seems like you sign up for one email newsletter, they might sell it to something else. Like, how am I on the New Yorker’s list? I don’t even know what that is. Well, I mean, it’s a magazine, but why would I be on that list? 1-800 contacts, Cameo, John Paul II High School. My high school is chasing me down still via email.

So you’re on all these lists, and you might be suspecting that some of these people might be selling your data. Why is it that sometimes you sign up for one email list and it seems like you’re on 30 or 40 email lists, or maybe you start getting random political emails. I don’t know where. I’ve been getting a lot of emails from Republican candidates and Democrat candidates, and I don’t know where they’re getting my email from. Well, here is exactly how to do it.

So what you want to do is go to any newsletter form. Let’s go to email10k.com/contract, because this is what we use to add people to our newsletter. And so we can go ahead and download. And now for the first name, you write Alex. But for the email address, here is the trick that you can use on Gmail. So instead of writing, alexberman8@gmail.com, I will instead add this plus sign and write alexberman8+e10k@gmail.com to stand for email10k, which is the website that I’m on.

You can see the logo here. And so now I’ll download the contract, and this email will now be added to the list. I didn’t have to create a new email address. I didn’t have to do anything like that. Gmail already has the plus (+) built in. So all you do is do: (your email address) + (any sort of keyword that you want). You can see here that it downloaded right away.

And then I can unsubscribe from this list. But what will happen is if this list sells this email address, now any of those new emails will have this +e10k, and I can easily see who is spamming.

Feel free to try this trick out and let me know in the comments. Did it work? And is your data being sold to somebody that you didn’t expect?