Friday, August 2, 2013

Identifying spam on Craigslist just got easier!

Sometimes change is hard. But sometimes it’s pretty awesome! Kudos to the guys at Craigslist working hard to weed out all the spam. They have made a change to their system that makes life substantially harder on the spammers.

Craigslist now creates an email conduit for all email conversations. When you talk with someone via Craigslist, you will find that you’re using an account name made up of random letters and numbers, provided by Craigslist. Now, the downside is you can no longer see the email address of the person you’re talking to. However, the BIG upside is that the person (or spammer) you’re talking to can’t see your email address either.

What does this mean? It means spammers are no longer able to harvest your email address to spam you endlessly. That means spammers now need you to reply to a different email address than the conduit provided by Craigslist so they can get your email address. And that means it’s easier than ever to identify about 40% of the spam out there — both the spam that arrives in your email inbox and the spam that gets posted on Craigslist. Anytime you see a “woman” asking you to reply to an email other than by hitting “reply” to their post, or even if “she” mentions an alternate email address for you to contact, well, my friend, you have just identified spam. Be sure to report it to Craigslist as often as you can.


Want to know the other 20 rules for identifying spam? Check out Chapter 13 of Secrets of the Craigslist Conqueror!

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