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 whatever@username.users.panix.com ("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 linkedin@domain.org. 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.
