In the interest of full disclosure, I used to work at CNET and founded the gaming side of CNET’s business which was then Gamecenter.com and is now Gamespot.com.

In no instance did I ever personally see this happen or ever hear of it as a CNET business practice anywhere in the company (1995-2000). But here’s a guy who uses a fake email address generator to see who sells his email to spammers and he was shocked when GameSpot turned up in his net.

So, I use the Spamgourmet service to generate temporary email addresses that look like examplewebsite.20.coneill@xoxy.net. This means that I can give www.examplewebsite.com this email address, and they can send me 20 emails and then the email address automatically expires if I don’t say otherwise. As a result, I can generally tell exactly what Web site sold my email address to spammers, and it limits the damage they can do.

However, I didn’t expect to need this with GameSpot. I gave them the obvious Spamgourmet email address when I signed up, and received the normal confirmation email, etc. About a week or two later, I got spam to the same email address which seemed really odd…

[Read more about GameSpot and Email]

Tags: spam, cnet, realtechnews, alice hill, fake email, gamespot, gotcha