Can someone explain this to me? I have a Linkedin account, and the only time I get emails is when someone wants to connect with me. I opted out of all the other email categories, just like I do with every other site.
Do people really get emails from Linkedin after opting out of every category?
You're assuming people getting emails have LinkedIn accounts. When someone with your email signs up for LinkedIn and then lets LinkedIn access their contacts, everyone of their contacts receives and email from LinkedIn and they now have your email address to do with as they please.
Yup. I got hit by a bad driver who was not paying for repairs. He was high up in a national organisation for cycling. I found this out by joining up to LinkedIn and searching for him. Called his work and left a message at reception for him to "please call the guy he crashed into". He called within the hour. 3 years later the waves of spam are just as high despite unsubscribing and re unsubscribing.
I get emails on addresses that don't have linkedin accounts. I've opted out in every way indicated in the emails. They keep coming. AFAICT the only way to stop those is to actually create an account on that address.
On the address that does have an account, I've opted out of every kind of email. They just keep adding new kinds of emails every few months that I then have to opt out of again.
I've never had a LinkedIn account, and I've opted out of receiving "<Person> wants you to join their professional network on LinkedIn!" emails, and yet I somehow manage to get 2-3 messages from LinkedIn per month.
I never had an LinkedIn account and I get a suspicious amount of LinkedIn emails. The often are very creepy. One asked me to connect with my boss from a decade ago. Keep in mind, I've never had a LinkedIn account. Said boss didn't know my email address then and certainly doesn't know my new email address since its changed since the last time I've seen her a decade ago. Never seen her profile before that, never even knew she had a LinkedIn.
This is the perfect reason to use unique email addresses: they enable you to know exactly what the origin of the 'leak' is, and when you disable the address, the other addresses keep working normally.
Unique addresses can be accomplished with aliases. Gmail allows
<username>+label[+morewords]@gmail.com
where + is ignored by Gmail servers when matching, and 'label' can be defined by you. This keeps emails routing to the same account, but allows you to filter.
I am aware of that, my point stands "its a pain in the ass and requires effort for very, very little return."
Good luck finding services that accept a + in the email address and this is so common you aren't fooling anyone, it takes just a couple lines of code to strip pluses out of gmail addresses to get the "real" address if you are a spammer.
> I am aware of that, my point stands "its a pain in the ass and requires effort for very, very little return."
Where is this "pain in your ass"? With Gmail at least, you don't need to actually _create_ an alias before using one.
When prompted to enter an email somewhere on the web, you have to type your email in, regardless, correct? In that process, append '+domain' to your username and you've just created an alias for that domain. It's very low overhead.
> Good luck finding services that accept a + in the email address
I haven't come across one yet. Maybe you can cite a source? I am not disagreeing, just saying maybe you can give examples to back up these vociferous claims.
> strip pluses out
So far, Gmail is the only service I am aware of that uses '+' in this way. Other services may not have the same method (e.g., use another character).
Why would spammers actually _care_ to realize you're using a 'filter technique'? The lay person probably doesn't even know this feature exists, and spammers aren't targeting people like you, anyway.
Panix.com allows email addresses of the form [email protected] ("username" = your usual email address). It's not at all a pain in the ass, I just type it in, it makes a lot of filtering trivial, and I don't think any spammers have munged it. (And if they do... I get spam, which I do anyway.)
Better: run your own domain with a catch-all address, so you can sign up with something like [email protected]. Everything gets routed to the primary address. Pretty easy to set up with Google Apps or Zoho.
And for the services that don't accept email addresses with pluses...? And your friends/family/boss? They get unique pluses too? What about spammers who are smart enough to not remove but change the plus to random garbage before they send emails?
Getting creepy LinkedIn spam is such a non-issue it isn't worth exerting even a moderate amount of effort.
