Beats me how the hell so many spammers get my email address.  I’m pretty good about flying under the radar.  I usually use a junk Gmail account when I want to sign up for something that I think has the potential to haunt me down the road.

I do a lot on internet marketing so I’m always signing up for free reports about generating traffic, promoting affiliate products, search engine marketing, etc.  A few weeks ago I used my real email address to sign up for something from a “reputable” marketer and within hours I was getting tons of crap in my inbox.

Reputable marketers use optin measures to send you stuff. You submit your name and email, get a reply message back from the auto-responder that contains a link to click to verify that you requested the information. It keeps marketers from manually putting you into their list without your permission. It’s responsible permission based marketing.

I started noticing that all the destination websites in these where-the-f*ck-(I’m trying not to say fuck so much)-did-this-f*cking-email-come-from had the same little banner down on the bottom of their pages.  I traced it back to a very evil viral list builder called www.viralurl.com  (don’t even go there)  It’s the proverbial anti-Christ of spam spewing marketing.  Here’s how it works…

You sign up for this viral url thing to protect your affiliate links so people can’t circumnavigate your links by stripping out your ID so you won’t get paid your commission on a sale.  Well, I got news for you dumbasses who buy into that shit.  Circumnavigation is easy.  All you have to do is figure out the destination page and go directly to the target site in another browser because your other browser already got cookied.  Or you can find the cookie on your computer and delete it. 

Anyhoo, so someone goes to your page and they see this little banner on the bottom of your page (and yes, they’ve already been cookied from that, too) and they click on it and then watch the little video and go “Hey, I need that!”  So they sign up for it and THAT’S where the spam begins.

You see, every one who signs under you and who signs under them and who signs under those losers – on down through FIVE levels – you get to email them.  No optins, no permission, no nothing.  You’re just straight up automatically in their list.  It’s f*cking evil.  Get the shovel.