This week I’ve been invited to join in a couple of important initiatives in recognition of “my key role and experience”. This first was to join an “inner circle” of CFOs (I am not a CFO – I have to take my shoes and socks off to count to ten) and the second was to join a international conference of CMOs (I am not a CMO – I have to take…well, you know).

I appreciate that for a PR guy to whine about receiving spam may seem hypocritical, but the fact that I get (mildly) annoyed by getting spam mail that is at best tangentially related to my professional field gives me increased sympathy for reporters who routinely receive hundreds of irrelevant e-mails from eager young flacks desperate to get their news release into the media – any media. I’m not going to go so far as to start outing all the people who send me e-mails I don’t want, but I have developed a plan for tracking which organisations are selling my contact details to the spammers.

Every time I subscribe to an online service I now enter an e-mail address based on my own domain that uniquely identifies that service. Likewise whenever I am asked by a professional organization to provide an e-mail address I create one for that particular organization. Since my e-mail server has a catch all account for mail to my domain, I can effectively have as many ‘e-mail addresses’ as I like. And when I get a spam email to an address that I’ve provided to another organization then I can challenge that organization directly.

It’s probably a convoluted way of doing it – I’m not on the Tech practice, after all – but I want to know which companies are supplementing their income by selling my private information.