Spam email help

Speed38 · Feb 18, 2014

Here is my "problem" and I hope someone can provide a solution.

For example: I go online searching a medical condition. E.g., diabetes diagnosis and treatment. I follow link after link accumulating information.

Within a week or two, I am seeing numerous emails about diabetes: cures, diets, books, etc.

What if I wanted to search assisted suicide or suicide (relax, I don't). I certainly wouldn't like my wife to look over my shoulder at incoming emails about books on assisted suicide, emails from suicide-prevention sites, etc.

What can I do on my Mac, other than using TOR, because TOR won't allow one to watch a video and often the medical sites have numerous videos I would like to watch.

In short, I'd like to on occasion surf and not have the sites to which I surf be able to know who I am and besiege me with emails.

Many thanks,

Tumbleweed666 · Feb 18, 2014

This doesn't happen to me and I'd be disturbed if it did, I'd be wondering how they know your email address to send stuff to ?!
I use adblocker on my browsers, maybe that helps, but I'm at a loss to know where they are picking your email up from.

chown33 · Feb 18, 2014

Who is providing your email service? Is it Gmail?

Did you enter your email address at any websites that you were looking at?

Safari has a "Private Browsing" feature. You should turn it on.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ph5000

You should also learn how the "Reset Safari" menu-item works, located under the Safari menu.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ph11914
At a minimum, you should probably:
- Reset all location warnings
- Remove all website data
- Remove saved names & passwords
- Remove other AutoFill form text

Intelligent · Feb 18, 2014

Speed38 said: ↑

Here is my "problem" and I hope someone can provide a solution.

For example: I go online searching a medical condition. E.g., diabetes diagnosis and treatment. I follow link after link accumulating information.

Within a week or two, I am seeing numerous emails about diabetes: cures, diets, books, etc.

What if I wanted to search assisted suicide or suicide (relax, I don't). I certainly wouldn't like my wife to look over my shoulder at incoming emails about books on assisted suicide, emails from suicide-prevention sites, etc.

What can I do on my Mac, other than using TOR, because TOR won't allow one to watch a video and often the medical sites have numerous videos I would like to watch.

In short, I'd like to on occasion surf and not have the sites to which I surf be able to know who I am and besiege me with emails.

Many thanks,
Click to expand...

You probably use gmail do you? Thats weird but Google, usually tracks a lot of stuff.

Tumbleweed666 · Feb 18, 2014

I use gmail but never have this problem. Is there something in gmail about receiving mail for related products you can untick maybe ?

Shrink · Feb 18, 2014

Speed38 said: ↑

Here is my "problem" and I hope someone can provide a solution.

For example: I go online searching a medical condition. E.g., diabetes diagnosis and treatment. I follow link after link accumulating information.

Within a week or two, I am seeing numerous emails about diabetes: cures, diets, books, etc.

What if I wanted to search assisted suicide or suicide (relax, I don't). I certainly wouldn't like my wife to look over my shoulder at incoming emails about books on assisted suicide, emails from suicide-prevention sites, etc.

What can I do on my Mac, other than using TOR, because TOR won't allow one to watch a video and often the medical sites have numerous videos I would like to watch.

In short, I'd like to on occasion surf and not have the sites to which I surf be able to know who I am and besiege me with emails.

Many thanks,
Click to expand...

You might try Ghostery and/or DoNotTrackMe to reduce the amount of information provided about your website visits.

Nothing is perfect, but these help...

Speed38 · Feb 18, 2014

Thanks for all those replies and in reply:

I use the Safari extensions Ad Blocker, Ghostery, & DoNotTrackme and, just for good luck, WebOfTrust.

I thought that Private Browsing was useful only for hiding your browsing history; does it do more than this? And, BTW, when I went to those sites, I had Private Browsing turned on. Does Private Browsing indeed do more that just hide your browser's history?

Yes, I do have a Gmail account.

No, I did not register with and did not give my email address to any of the sites I visited. (Had I had to, I would have used @mailinator.com, a throwaway email address).

From time to time, usually at my weekly backup, I will reset Safari and check all the boxes associated with that reset.

So I really am stumped at the "coincidence" of visiting X site then suddenly begin receiving emails on X subject soon thereafter.

chown33 · Feb 18, 2014

Speed38 said: ↑

Thanks for all those replies and in reply:

I use the Safari extensions Ad Blocker, Ghostery, & DoNotTrackme and, just for good luck, WebOfTrust.

I thought that Private Browsing was useful only for hiding your browsing history; does it do more than this? And, BTW, when I went to those sites, I had Private Browsing turned on. Does Private Browsing indeed do more that just hide your browser's history?

Yes, I do have a Gmail account.

No, I did not register with and did not give my email address to any of the sites I visited. (Had I had to, I would have used @mailinator.com, a throwaway email address).

From time to time, usually at my weekly backup, I will reset Safari and check all the boxes associated with that reset.

So I really am stumped at the "coincidence" of visiting X site then suddenly begin receiving emails on X subject soon thereafter.
Click to expand...

You can probably thank google for the tracking.

They certainly track the IP address used to make search queries, so even a full Safari reset won't change that. And they certainly track search terms you use, and sites you visit by clicking on search results.

Also recall that Google owns DoubleClick.net, a very common ad network. Cookies set by doubleclick.net from one site are certainly visible to other doubleclick-provided ads from other sites.

So if you're doing your searching and email through google, then personally, I wouldn't be at all surprised to get email that seems to be a result of tracking searches. If it happened to me, I'd just add it to my spam filter.

Also, "analytics" is another way to track you, and it isn't necessarily blocked by ad-blockers.

Recent versions of Safari show less detail about cookies, local-storage, etc. that can be set by websites. Without knowing all the details, including which websites provided which ads, it's impossible to puzzle it out. All it takes is one slip-up on your part, or one particular piece of JavaScript in an analytics package, and your anonymity is gone.

Speed38 · Feb 18, 2014

chown33 said: ↑

So if you're doing your searching and email through google, then personally, I wouldn't be at all surprised to get email that seems to be a result of tracking searches. If it happened to me, I'd just add it to my spam filter.
Click to expand...

Would you suggest/do you think switching the search engine to Yahoo or Bing instead? Might that prevent problems like the one that prompted me to begin this thread??

Fishrrman · Feb 19, 2014

[[ What can I do on my Mac, other than using TOR, because TOR won't allow one to watch a video and often the medical sites have numerous videos I would like to watch. ]]

Try the "Epic" browser -- it can hide you IP address, prevent tracking, etc.

It's based on the Chrome browser, but all the "google stuff" has been stripped out of it.

You can find it here:
https://www.epicbrowser.com

Speed38 · Feb 20, 2014

Thanks for that info; I have downloaded the browser.

AppleP59 · Sep 30, 2014

Speed38 said: ↑

Thanks for that info; I have downloaded the browser.
Click to expand...

Any update?

Speed38 · Sep 30, 2014

Epic Browser

After visiting several sites which cast aspersion on the Epic browser, saying it really didn't offer much privacy at all, I deleted it. Having heard, OTOH, good things about the Aviator browser, I have been using that instead.

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