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"Keep in mind how much spam those networks churn out on a daily basis"

Hmm...Correct me if I am wrong but "those" networks are not producing exactly as much spam as that generated from _inside_ the US. (http://www.mailinator.com/mailinator/map.html). Sorry to busrt your misplaced patriotic bubble.

Any time you don't want to leave personal information on a webform, just use mailinator.

You never have to worry about giving out your email address & getting flooded with spam.

Check your inbox

Mailinator is an annonymous "spamtrap" email system accessable for everyone.

I don't get spam, period. I have 3 active mail accounts (Gmail, Hotmail and College), and they're all clear. Prehaps not giving out our email addresses unless we trust the source might solve a lot of peoples problems. If you need an email address to use for a signup might I suggest Mailinator. You don't need to sign up or waste any time like that, all you do is use (anything)@mailinator.com as your signup address and then go to their site to check it. For the majority of boards I use this is how I signup to them, they don't need to know who I am, for many of them I have them on an aggregator or I check them periodically anyway so its not a problem.

My Gmail account is my "send everything here" account. It gets spam from every where from tin foil hat sites to live journal.

That, and throwaway user accounts, is what I have used mailinator for.

disclosure: I have no affiliation whatsoever with mailinator.

4. I just checked my Yahoo! Mail account (which I only use to give to stupid registration-required sites), and my inbox is full of spam. My GMail inbox has yet to receive a spam message.

If you don't want to bother creating/deleting emails in your own domain (or for those without personal domains), I've found these services to be very useful for this sort of thing:

http://www.spamgourmet.com/
http://www.sneakemail.com/
http://www.mailinator.com/

It is completly automated reply. Here is an example: http://www.mailinator.com/mailinator/showmail.jsp? email=yvbvksjxxot&msgnum=0

http://www.mailinator.com/ ...create some really screwed up address that no one would ever guess and just set your web browser to remember the settings. Little fuss, no muss, and no bugmenot.

Good questions for the FAQ!...let's see:

>So, what do you really do with all
>that spam (besides mapping it?)
>
The spam we reject (after grabbing a few bits of nfo for the map). The actual data we use to make the map.

>Do you aggregate it, identify zombies,
>notify authorities, or just plonk >every little byte of it?
>
We're open to suggestions - got any good uses for the spam data? We get plenty - we get over a million emails a day and very little is NOT spam. What *should* we do with the data? Right now we map it and toss it. Ideas?

>What kind of hardware/software do you run?
>
Hardware - heck I'm not sure of that - I'd have to let Paul answer that. I've only been on board about a month - I did the RSS feeds and the map.

Software - a custom, in-house, from-scratch java mail server (written by Paul). The webserver is Jetty.

>What do you get out of it besides a bunch of
>very satisfied geeks?
>
That's it - and we don't even get that sometimes. I wish I could say we are rich beyond our wildest dreams, but the fact is it COSTS Paul money to keep Mailinator running. Over a million emails a day uses a fair amount of bandwidth/resources. I can't speak for Paul, but I did it just for fun and to add it to my resume.

brian

Try our alternate domains

Use one of mailinator's alternate domains!

Try Mailinator. It's perfect for those disposable email addresses. There is no link to you other than an IP in an apache log file. (Most disposable email address providers require an email address to forward your mail to.)

I never get how anyone can ever use the argument that some people might "want" spam. If you want to buy something, you can find it on the net. I NEVER want to be inundated with junk adverts.

Mailinator lets me avoid getting spam in the first place. Good luck microsoft.

Yup, there's no spam at mailinator.

And Mailinator does a better job at throwaway addresses anyways.

On first blush, this seems like a "look at me!" article. But I think the author does bring up some good points on methodologies used in fighting spam on a large scale. However, one thing that isn't emphasized is how little deliverable email he gets. It looks like it averages 5-10 messages per hour.

So the next question is, how would his techniques scale to a domain that processes 3.5 million emails per day and rejects 0.25-3.0 million spam emails per day. Plus, to reduce the risk of false positives, much of the spam is actually delivered to users. All delivered email has a spam score added to the email headers for the individual user to decide their threshold for filtering.

For those of you out there who are IT for domains that handle millions of emails per day, how do you handle spam? How many servers and how much bandwidth does it require?

If you're curious, I get 100 emails per day delivered and 78.2% of that is spam. Unfortunately, I've found that I can't rely on the spam score added to the headers by the aforementioned domain. My filter (k9, Bayesian) currently has a false negative rate of 0.49% and false positive rate of 0.00%. Yeah, that means I see a single piece of spam every two days on average. In reality, I'll usually get a surge of spam where on a single day I might get two or three pieces of spam, followed by a week of nothing once the filter has adapted.

For protection on the net, especially for usenet and web forms, I use disposable email addresses (ie: spamgourmet, mailinator).

Get enough SPAM lately? Have you ever gone to a website that asks for your email address for no reason (other than they are going to sell it to the highest bidder so you get spam forever)?

Welcome to Mailinator(tm) - Its no signup, instant anti-spam service. Here is how it works: You are on the web, at a party, or talking to your favorite insurance salesman. Wherever you are, someone (or some webpage) asks for your email. You know if you give it, you're gambling with your privacy. On the other hand, you do want at least one message from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don't need to sign-up. You just make it up on the spot. Pick jonesy@mailinator.com or bipster@mailinator.com - pick anything you want (up to 15 characters before the @ sign).

Later, come to this site and check that account. Its that easy. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you're done - you can walk away - an instant solution to one way spammers get your address. Its an anti-spam solution for everyone. The messages are automatically deleted for you after a few hours.

Let'em spam.

Or, use something like dodgeit or mailinator

A disposable email address, http://www.mailinator.com/ is your friend!

Exactly, and if you're forced to sign up for something, either use Bugmenot for anonymous login information, or Mailinator, for throwaway email addys.

No, that's what Mailinator is for. (to hit confirm when you sign up for a service like nytimes).

Welcome to Mailinator(tm) - Its no signup, instant anti-spam service. Here is how it works: You are on the web, at a party, or talking to your favorite insurance salesman. Wherever you are, someone (or some webpage) asks for your email. You know if you give it, you're gambling with your privacy. On the other hand, you do want at least one message from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don't need to sign-up. You just make it up on the spot. Pick jonesy@mailinator.com or bipster@mailinator.com - pick anything you want (up to 15 characters before the @ sign).

Later, come to this site and check that account. Its that easy. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you're done - you can walk away - an instant solution to one way spammers get your address. Its an anti-spam solution for everyone. The messages are automatically deleted for you after a few hours.

Let'em spam.

What, no webmail?

Actually for "you will be emailed your activation code" type activities, I recommend:
http://www.mailinator.com/

It's convenience itself: just make up an email account (up to 15 chatracters) @mailinator.com and use that to fill in the form with. There's no need to CREATE an account ahead of time: that is done automatically whenever an email is recieved. You don't even need a password!

Why hastle yourself with YET ANOTHER hotmail account for ANOTHER password when you only need to use it once?

I used to use your system. Unfortunately it has 2 flaws which made me change it again:

First, the spambots also send a lot of mail to fantasy names with your domain or-- even worse-- they use a fantasy name with your domain as the sender address so you get the millions of error mails.

Second, I once received a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer because I used their domain as part of my email address to subscribe to their newsletter. It was something like lawyer.com@my-domain.net.

I then decided to have only some emails addresses like public@my-domain.net, lists@my-domain.net etc. to roughly know where they come from.

For useless one-time email addresses, I use the Mailinator. Excellent for that purpose.

Why put a fake one when a real one will work as well? :)

For those things there is Mailinator [mailinator.com].

Throwaway accounts should never be, out of all places, registered on Hotmail.com. They suspend your account if you don't login for 30 days. At least Yahoo!Mail or other free alternatives let you forget the account for few months and not get penalized for it. gn

For those things there is Mailinator [mailinator.com].

Throwaway accounts should never be, out of all places, registered on Hotmail.com. They suspend your account if you don't login for 30 days. At least Yahoo!Mail or other free alternatives let you forget the account for few months and not get penalized for it. bb

For those things there is Mailinator [mailinator.com].

Throwaway accounts should never be, out of all places, registered on Hotmail.com. They suspend your account if you don't login for 30 days. At least Yahoo!Mail or other free alternatives let you forget the account for few months and not get penalized for it. ir

Gmails spam-filter works well, just wish there was a way to filter out languages... send($language) to spam-folder. I don't give out my gmail address, i use a domain that is re-directed to the account, but i keep getting spam in russian, addressed to the gmail addy.

For temp & signup emails i use http://www.mailinator.com/, it seems to be down at the moment - because of the silly amounts of spam they recieve. It's a great service when it works, get a temp inbox with any addy you want. The box is deleted after a couple of hours, nothing to trace it back to you!

Mailinator providees free, temporary email addresses. Just type in somethingorother@mailinator.com, email will be sent there, and the emails within that account will be deleted in a short amount of time.

My favorite is mailinator.

Is this good enough?

Have you head of Mailinator?

Basically, you can make up any e-mail address, say foobar2004@mailinator.com and go and check it later. All you have to do is type in your chosen name and check for mail. It's useful for websites you don't really trust (but not for those you might continually receive useful mail from). And, of course, it's incredibly unsuitable for any personal information, since anyone can check any "account" if they can guess its name. And e-mails only stay for a certain number of hours/days. But for quick signups that just require some sort of e-mail address, it works.

Never give out your main email address, except for trusted friends/family memebers. Also, never post this email address anywhere on the net, if possible. Trusted people are people who know enough about computers and the internet to know not to sign you up for mailing lists and other useless crap like that.

Create a backup email address at Yahoo, HotPop, whatever. Use this one for singing up for services on the web, and for "untrusted" friends/family.

Use http://mailinator.com/ for anything and everything else.

• I've received a grand total of two spam emails to my main addresses, and only a handful to my Yahoo one, which are whisked away to the bulk folder, anyway.

Mod parent up! Free web based email services such as www.mail2web.com and www.mailinator.com are invaluable resources!

And if you like mailinator.com, try Nator - it pulls email from mailinator and sends it to your own Inbox. Cross-platform and free!

And finaly A new hotmail address every month or so for sites that want personal info to log in ect where you want to look at something but you think you might get spam. Think of it as giving microsoft a DNS attack with every new spam this act needs to deal with.

Forget the "Catch All" e-mail address. Use Mailinator.

FYI -- mailinator is a non-passworded public catch-all system. Perfect for temporary site registrations. I use it frequently and its an unbelievably good service...

For this, Mailinator is perfect.

I used to use fuck@you.com or just @.com until I discovered mailinator.

These days, I just use Mailinator. They offer throw-away email addresses for free and automatically delete any mail the account receives after a few hours. That way, I can actually confirm registrations and the like but don't have to worry about spam. And I do not bother innocent third parties, such as the nowhere.com domain owners.

I used to use the ones you describe, as well as "fatchance@nospam.com." Then, I discovered Mailinator. This is pretty handy. You make up an address @mailinator.com. Mail can go there, and the address is "created" on the fly. Later, if you are really interested (say, a registration for a newspaper site), you can pick up the mail. After a few hours, the account is deleted.

Mailinator.com

No account sign-up, no password, just type in any user account name you can think of and check the email for it. Works great for the bazillion or so sites out there that have "free registration" but require a valid email address. All emails are deleted after a few hours.

fake email not even needed with ... Mailinator - make up an address @mailinator.com. An account gets dynamically generated when mail arrives, then deleted a few hours later. works a treat, only problem is a lot of websites are now blacklisting it.

I use mailinator. Biggest advantage over a fake e-mail address, you can get the one time e-mail you need to register (that many less reputable sites require).
So if i want to create a yahoo account for games, i just add joeshmoe@mailinator.com. and go to mailinator to receive my 'activate account' email.
Mailinator jsut creats a password free e-mail address when ever it receives an e-mail to the address. It then deletes it about an hour later

Same thing has been around for a while with www.mailinator.com.

Mailinator is a great site for disposable e-mail addresses. Whenever i have to sign up for soem or other account i just get them to send my password to averagejoe@mailinator.com
Definatly helps keep your name off of spam lists

You could also try using Mailinator.com to use as a throwaway, although that's not really the intent you had, was it?

well, maybe you have to make up an email address to get it, but it's available.

Mailinator.com is also another site in the same vein, only you have to enter the email; all the emails aren't automatically displayed.