Hello everyone, I'm a bit confused on how advertising companies know my email address and started offering products which are far beyond my purchasing ideals? Could anyone shed me some light?
If you have entered your email anywhere on blogs, or websites for newsletters or emails. Or if you participated in any polls or challenges online, sometimes when you publish a comment or send a request or an opinion to the media channels, they store those email ids and may sell however they see fit.
like the guys above me said, it is enough that you entered your email just once somewhere, it doesn't even matter if you gave permission, a lot of this companies don't have the highest regards to ethics.
Google, facebook, amazon and co do share/sell your data. Other alternative is extracting from domain whois database.
OK. Thank you for your responses. How can I minimize or stop this act? I don't like receiving bunches of advertising emails.
You need to have a "throw-away" email address that you use to sign up for things online, etc. That one will always be filled with spam emails but you will know not to care about it. You then save your personal email address only for friends, family, colleagues, etc. In your case, you could keep your current email address as the throwaway email address since it is already getting spam and start a new one just for personal use.
Start Unsubscribing such email. At the end of every promotional email, there is a section where advertiser do provide a unsubscribe link. I hope this will help.
Did you opt-in to their email list or subscribe to their offer? If you didn't that is actually considered spam, you can have those flagged and they cannot send those offers to your anymore.
Did you ever fill in a form on any website that requires your name, email address etc? or Told companies information over the phone willingly? If you willing did that, then it counts as a opt-in or subscription. Otherwise it does not count.