One of the weirder things I like to do when I attend conferences is to create a unique email address. The main reason for this is so that I can be aware of when my email gets released or sold to 3rd parties (which happens frequently). When you attend a marketing conference you have to expect that you’ll be marketed to. I have no problems with marketing emails, but I do take issue when my information gets released to others. I’ve been tracking SXSW specifically for some time. Here’s the breakdown by year.

It would appear that 2015 by far is the numbers! Most email providers will either allow you to create email addresses on the fly by adding special characters or creating aliases. For example, you can create a unique email address on the fly with Gmail by adding + to the end of your email before the @. I can say myemail+nospam@gmail.com and it will still get to me! How cool is that?

Once again we win the internet by measuring everything we do. What we measure improves!