I just got a Gmail account, thanks to the generosity of Plan B.
I haven’t used it to send any messages. I never filled out the address in any web forms. I never posted the address to any Web sites. Basically, the account’s address is unknown to the outside world.
Today, I checked the account, just for the hell of it, and found this:
and
The addresses are vaugely simlilar to mine, but not quite. Still, though, I got the misaddressed spam.
Think of the implications: instead of fishing for addresses, spammers now just have to send out e-mail to a bunch of random strings, knowing that it will be directed to a Gmail account with a similar username. This is perhaps the one thing that can really, really hurt the value of Gmail.
I’ve had a gmail account for about two months now, have posted it on a couple websites, use it for daily correspondences, and have it as my listed email address for at least two different sites (including this one) and in all that time, I have yet to get a single piece of spam whereas my yahoo, hotmail, and aol addresses (which all use the same name, sans the last one) all get the occasional unwanted email.
Apart from emails to my brother and a couple of friends, I haven’t used my gmail account at all. Zero spam thus far.
My primary email account (@gmx.net) has been absolutely brilliant at blocking spam in the past three years I’ve been using it - I can count the number of times I’ve received spam at this address on the fingers of my hand. And this is without even setting up any filters!