An infinite number of throw-away email addresses....

[thewayne]

A recent post and subsequent replies from donkey_hokey spurred me to look up this site address and post it to her. Then it occurred to me that this is something that lots of people may use, and chances are that a number of people on my flist haven't heard me mention this or may have forgotten about it.

Anyway, there is a web site called Mailinator. They provide a very anonymous email system that is read-only. Email can be sent to it and received, but you cannot send email from said site. So if there is a web site that you have to register for to access any content, but you don't want them spamming you, this is a good way to do it. Just choose a name, add the @mailinator.com, and you're in business. Go to the Mailinator site, enter the name that you chose, and there will be your registration confirmation email. And if the site doesn't permit Mailinator domains for emails, there are several alternative Mailinator domains listed at the site.

The down side of this is that your email is not private. If Fred is the name that you chose, anyone can log on to the Fred mailbox and see all messages for "Fred". The messages are automatically deleted from the Mailinator system every few hours, so get your login email or whatever and move on. The boxes will only hold ten messages, and they have some other criteria for auto-deleting email before it gets to the email box. And best of all, "All images, scripts, and other email nasties are stripped from the above email.
This may affect the email's appearance." So your computer can't get nasties from malicious email.

I use this site quite frequently, between it and Yahoo's spam filtering, I don't get a heck of a lot of junk mail. Highly recommended.

Comments

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Going to have to post this to my del.icio.us account.

Though I gotta say, I get virtually *no* spam at my Yahoo account. My earthlink account gets a ton, but that's the addy I used to link from my website, and that's easily scraped -- and it's essential I have the addys there, so what can I do?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

There are techniques for obfuscating an email address on a site. I don't know exactly how to do it right now, but basically it's the same mechanism that you use to register for a web site. You do it through a form, the sender clicks the send button, and your email address is never revealed.

I plan on using it for my dad's site, for mine, also. When I get it going I'll let you know and we could graft it on to yours.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

Ahh! There's hope! Although, to be honest, not that much: my address is spread far and wide by now. :(

Still, I take any help on that I can get. Fortunately my email reader (whatever the heck it is) is pretty good about sorting out *most* of the junk into the junk bin. But I still get a lot in the "real" bin, and I still have to look at the junk bin because I find actual emails juuuuust often enough to keep me coming back.

[donkey-hokey.livejournal.com]

Heh.. I use Mailinator quite a bit. It's a very cool site. I'm sure I get much less junk mail because I've used it for so many sites.

The point with my previous post was to have a throwaway address that could also potentially annoy the hell out of this particular spammer.