Slashdot Mirror
Easy Throw-Away Email Addresses
netbuzz writes, "A fellow teaching himself Seam has come up with a clever Web app called 10 Minute Mail. It gives you a valid e-mail address — instantly — for use in registering at Web sites. Ten minutes later (more if you ask), it's gone. You can read mail and reply to it from the page where you create the throw-away address. Limited utility, yes, but easy and free."
I was curious as to how TMM stacked up against mailinator, my anonymous email of choice; mailinator has a time-limit of several hours, and its interface is slightly more elegant.
what Mailinator has been providing for years.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
There's no privacy (everyone can view everyone else's mail) but it's perfect for throwaway registrations where your only concern is reading whatever content some site has to offer.
Dodgeit.com is free and allows to you to specify any email address@dodgeit.com and read the emails that arrive.
http://www.dodgeit.com/
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
But now what will all of the brick and mortar stores do? When you place an online order and they require you to create an "account" using your e-mail, where will all the spam go? Will it, having nowhere to go, return upon itself, imploding into a spamularity, sucking all nearby email inside forever? The humanity!
What's the point of having an email address that's only around for a few minutes when you could just use a single throwaway email address for all of your registration needs. It doesn't expire, but since you only use it for registrations, it doesn't matter how much spam/cruft it accumulates.
--
RumorsDaily
Most of the people I know already keep a secondary address on gmail/hotmail, etc for this purpose.
This works, but things such as invites, forwards, e-cards that your friends send you with good intentions still mess things up. I had a good clean 3-year run with my last address, but lately it's just spiraled out of control.
A fellow teaching himself Seam has come up with a clever Web app called 10 Minute Mail
Their slogan... "JBoss Seam: For when you need more seam in your web experience."
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Receive only free email that automatically gets deleted every 7 days unless you make a donation, then you get to password protect and own the email address (as I do).
http://dodgeit.com/faq.html
- tokengeekgrrl
I have been using SpamGourmet http://www.spamgourmet.com/ for a while. It works great and is more flexible. This is going to run into the same problem other services like this do. Sites will simply stop accepting emails from that domain name.
willhackforfood.biz provided this service for a long time--seems to be down recently--i think someone from binrev.com started it--just so everyone's aware this isnt that new.
I have my own domain and I can create an unlimited number of throwaway addresses. If they behave, I keep it active. If it starts getting spam, I know which business I can't trust and I direct it to /dev/null/
For example, if I were to register with slashdot, I could just use slashdot@mydomain.com
I can keep it around for as short or as long as I want.
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
For all those sites you wanna sign up for, without the spam :)
Cheers.
Won't this actually help spammers? Email addresses that are thrown away thus they can't be completely stopped spamming a specific forum or inboxes.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
That's it. I can turn it on and off whenever I want.
This service shows how effectively promoting your service can really make a difference. While Mailinator has been around for a long time, somehow this 10minutemail has managed to get lots of exposure. I wonder did they really get all these mentions around the net just organically, or was there heavy promotion involved? If the success came organically, perhaps it's because 10minutemail is easier to understand. Just from the domain name it's easy to guess what the service is for.
I know of at least two different sites which give out disposable e-mail addresses so I don't really understand why this is newsworthy.
http://www.spamgourmet.com/
You create an account and spamgourmet will bounce the mail to you. The syntax is: [word].[number of mails].[username]@spamgourmet.com. When the alloted number of e-mails has been used the mails will bounce unless you allow more through.
http://www.mailinator.com/
You just make up a string of letters and use those letters to view the account at mailinator. This is a truly disposable mail address since the inbox is open to anyone who chooses to look at the account. If the information is semiimportant you should choose a pretty random mail address.
First, there are tons of other services that do this already. However, I personally am not very interested in expiring addresses; I frequently want to keep receiving mail at that address into the future (and some services simply don't allow you to update your email address, in which case you're screwed).
Up until last year I've been using the popular (and open-source) Spamgourmet. It caps you at a max of 20 messages, though, so if you want to keep receiving mail at that address, you need to continually reset the message count (and a burst of mail exceeding the limit will result in lost messages). Furthermore, a lot of spammers have been targeting it lately, generating email address like blah1.yourusername@spamgourmet.com or blah2.yourusername@spamgourmet.com. Yes, you can solve this by requiring watchwords, but then you need to remember to add that substring into all your future email addresses.
Another one that I've been using a bunch is mailnull.com, which lets you explicitly create addresses in the form of yourusername.ebay@mailnull.com. A disadvantage is that you cannot use it as an outgoing proxy for sending mail.
Finally, there's sneakemail.com, which is like mailnull, except you work with completely mangled names (aw4jo48esaf9@sneakemail.com), and it does proxy outgoing mail (so I use it when signing up for things where I may want to reply, i.e. mailing lists). At first, the sneakemail site is a complete turn-off, but the service is probably the closest to what I'd want to use.
I personally find Spamgourmet to be more interesting...
You sign up (yeah, I know, you have to trust them) and give out email addresses like
madeupkeyword.X.yourusername@spamgourmet.org
where X is the number of messages (up to 20) that you want to allow for a particular word. Spamgourmet forwards X number of messages to your email, and then quietly destroys any further messages.
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
I use mytrashmail.com
http://www.bugmenot.com/ -- for when you need a username/pass to log into a particular free site (New York Times, AllMusic, etc.) but don't want to bother registering. Assumedly, this site will knock out half of your reasons to use these various quickie e-mail services. Enjoy!
This isn't that new of a concept, Spamhole has been doing this for years now. Though, some of the major server-side spam blockers will filter out spamhole before it ever reaches your inbox.
Thanks for the heads up slashdot - I've updated my forums' email ban list. It's joined the likes of mailinator.com and its alias domains (fakeinformation.com and sogetthis.com).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I use these throwaway e-mail addresses quite a lot in testing various web applications (which often require unique e-mail addresses for each registration or whatever). A lot of people have already mentioned Mailinator, so I'll also mention 2Prong. I came across it one day when Mailinator was down for whatever reason. It has a couple of things in its favor. First, it only uses a domain for two days before moving on to a different domain for throwaway e-mail addresses. So the likelihood of you ever finding the domain blocked is essentially nil. Second, it works completely automatically. All you do is copy/paste the e-mail address, use it, and then the page auto-refreshes when it gets the confirmation e-mail or whatever it is you're looking for. Nice and clean.
If you want to go to the site directly, go here:
10MinuteMail.com
It will just be a matter of time before people that write forms make these email addresses not available to be registered with. I've seen some apps that already block some of the other fake email generators.
I use Spamgourmet and I'm really happy with it. It's kept my real email address protected for years.
And yet another domain to add to my list of blocked domains... that much is appreciated.
.02 cents...
If people are so concerned with their emails "getting out", then use a 1/2 way acceptable disposable email service (gmail comes to mind) and just use it to subscribe to things.
There are too many applications out there for email protection. My favorite is Hide My Email. It's simple, fast, and free. If someone REALLY wants to get your email, they can. To me, that's the valid part... I'm not preventing anyone from contacting me... I'm just making them prove that the contact is worth the effort.
Just my
--- http://www.keything.com
They're going to be pretty pissed if Google cancels their account because of that little jewel.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Just write to me at... oh, wait, it expired. OK, just did a new one. Shoot me a note at... damn. Hold on. OK, ready. Hit me at... damn! Never mind.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_e-mail_add ress
http://www.mailinator.com/
http://www.pookmail.com/
Yeah, I've got one of those.
As 100% of emails to that address were spam it now silently deletes anything sent to it.
I use "abuse@whatever.com" to sign up. Gets the message through loud and clear.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
2Prong is great (except it crashes my firefox 1.5 on ubuntu but who knows...probobly not their fault)
Bottles.
Oh good. I have 1 messages. I also have 1 computers, 1 kid(s) and 1 cars at home. FFS people, how hard is it to write a few extra lines of code that append an "s" to the word "message" only if you have MORE than one message???
What is to keep the domains of these services from being blacklisted for use? There are already many websites that require you to use the primary e-mail address of your ISP like a comcast.net or aol.com.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
Just get (another) gmail account and use that. Or am I missing something?
That's almost the same as my strategy. I get everything at my domiain that is not destined for an existing user, so I sign up to each and every web service that requires an email address with @mydomain.com
Again, you can see almost immediately where dodgy email is coming from if they decide to do a little bit of a sell, or they have poor security around their email databases. I find however that 99.9% of the span I get (well, block - greylist milter FTW), the address is sourced from other people who have my real email address, and don't protect their systems well enough. Trojans et al are very good at harvesting email addresses of home PCs these days.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
1. Sign up
2. enter on the website in question
3. go to hotmail and sift through junk until you find the verification email.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
http://www.mytrashmail.com/
Very handy temporary email accounts.
yawn, others provide this already. not going to talk about mailinator or spamgourmet but i will mention www.spam.la as no one has yet. thats my discardable email of choice, sure all the emails arriving @spam.la are visible on there but you can filter. simple and straighforward. and no signingup required. enjoy.
I just use a gmail adress for that. Login to the site and eneter my gmailadress houghi.spam@gmail.com, go to gmail and see if it already there. If not do a refresh.
No need for me to fill out some adress I have to look up or activate first. I also don't care how much spam I recieve on that adress, as long as I can see the mail arriving. If spam is so much active, I can just make a new gmail adress.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
check out temporaryinbox.com
I wish there were a bot like Majordomo which would take a remote email address, generate a hash from it, create a new mailbox alias with the hash as its name, and send a message to the remote address notifying it of the new mailbox. With a note attached, either a default or one I specify when I trigger the process.
/etc/aliases file. I'm disappointed it's not fully automated by now. Maybe a Slashdotter will surprise me, and tell me where the installer package can be grabbed.
Then I could generate addresses for each remote party with whom I correspond, and delete them. I could control whether an address bounces or just consumes mail later. I could expire the mailboxes after a time period, or a message count, or both.
And I could track how the remote parties disclose my address to one another, by watching which addresses receive messages from new remote parties, without the new remote sender even seeing that the addres they used contained the ID of the party to which I originally sent it.
That app would be very useful since I manage my own mailboxes. But it would work just as well for anyone using mailboxes I manage, as long as they trust me to keep the hash lookups. They're trusting me to handle their mail, so that seems OK. So webmail providers could use it, too.
I used to do this manually, editing my
--
make install -not war
Spambox is yet another disposable email address service with one notable difference; it doesn't give you access to the box but rather forwards mail to some other address of choice. You can also adjust the time period of the validity of the address.
Spambob.org provides a similar service already.
I wrote up a simple webapp for similar purposes a while ago:
e _tech/print.php/3596436
http://dodgemail.com/
The main difference is that you get a javascript snippet that creates time-sensitive email aliases that forward to you. They are only good for an hour or so, so they are spam proof to all email spiders except those with immediate turnaround.
Brian Livingston did a much more comprehensive writeup on it here:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/executiv
Make a new one and when the balance starts looking ugly, throw it away and make a fresh new shiny one!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Here's another list:
v ices
http://www.listible.com/list/disposable-email-ser
I also don't know why this 10minutemail site is getting the attention it is. I like jetable and shortmail myself (option to forward).
At least on my SBC Yahoo account I've been able to do so... you click the button and it creates a fake e-mail address that forwards to your real one and lets you send on behalf of it.. just delete it when you're done.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
This can be very hard if you want to expand your market beyond anglophone world, especially to users who speak languages that have ways of forming plurals other than something like the s-suffixation used in English. For instance, some nouns in English, German, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sindarin use what has been called an infix or a simulfix: goose > geese. Worse, languages may have more than two categories of grammatical number. Categories attested in some languages other than English include nullar, dual, paucal, and distributive plural.
Disadvantage: seems to need Javascript - doesn't work for me.
Also, if it catches on, blocker scripts could quite easily add the new domains to their block lists regularly by simply sending a request to the site and parsing the generated email address.
So its like a digital condom whenever we're going to register our something on a website.
Forgetmail.com has been doing this for years....but without the need to register beforehand. Also, it has a nice clean and slick(ajax) interface.
that i will now get all my emails in under 10 minutes? why, just the other day my staff sent me some emails along with my internets
Mod parent up - the "+" is quite unreliable. qmail uses a "-" for the mostly-same purpose.
For those who think this strategy well-and-truly evaporates when companies realize it, think again.
Let me back up a step: There are three reasons to use such a strategy: Tracking (eg, to prevent them realizing that the same person registered at two sites when they control both) spam ( to prevent spam) and spam-tracking (to track who SENT you spam.)
The tracking requirement is only met with very unique addresses - ideally at different such services from different IPs, perhaps using TOR - or using TOR sometimes. Gmail w/ plus isn't really good enough for this if companies figure it out, but it isn't really good enough anyway, personally.
The other two requirements it IS good enough for. Even if spam companies figure out to strip back to the plus, that only gives them access to the main account. Since the main account isn't secret, simply don't use it as your "private" account - let it get filtered like all the other semi-spam. If you want some mail to have a "nospam" priority do something like "me+secretworkemail@gmail.com" where you're ADDING more/different stuff after the plus.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
BEWARE of the "+" addressing of Gmail feature. I signed up for a MySpace account (bad idea) with my email "+signup" so I could immediately send all the ensuing crap to the garbage. A month later when I went to delete my MySpace account, they informed me they would send send me an email to confirm my delete. After doing this about 10 times, I realized I was never going to get the mail and I wondered why. I DUG IN a little and guess what I found out? ....there stupid code was sending an email to "myemail signup@gmail.com"!! A white space character! So my conclusion was that when I registered, their client side string validation parsed out the "+" character and they stored my email in the database as "myemail signup@gmail.com" which of course is not valid. After about 40 million emails to MySpace explaining this I've given up on canceling my account and settled for obfuscation.
BEWARE: bonehead sites might parse out the plus sign
HELP: Anyone know any way I can get MySpace to delete my account? (I've tried changing my email address but guess what: you have to confirm it by email to your original address first!)
BAAAGGGHHH!
If it catches on, and it starts getting blocked, there will be other ways. Which came first, throwaway email addresses or email-hoarding / pointless-registrations ? I think its a justified reaction, and will remain so for the forseable.
There is this service out there ... I believe that it is called Hotmail or something. It is free and easy to use. You sign up for an account (maybe MySpamAccountForOnlineStuffandThings@hotmail.com), and then use it exclusively for online accounts, etc etc. Will it get flooded by SPAM? Absolutely. But who cares, it's your SPAM account.
Or Gmail.
Or Yahoo.
Or any of the free services.
This is easy stuff, folks, and you don't need a temporary address that will eventually be blocked by the majority of the verification systems to take care of it. One account for work, one for personal life (or two, because your 10-year old hotmail account is too full of V1@grA! adds), and one for junk. Not exactly hard to do, folks.
You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them.
i will NOT use my isp email address, i use it for family business but for others i always create an email at yahoo and gmail for use then forgot the email, so i say fuckgetted and just use a temp email address at mailinator or dispoasbable mail.. that is if your using it to sign up for newsletters, porNOs, and forums
ya nah wha ima sayin' daqies?
oh noes! you banned a tempory email site!
This will do nothing to help you in any way. people will stil use some yahoo/gmail/hotmail account.
Or they'll have an extra email account they get from their ISP as a dumping ground.
the only thing you ahve done is allienate people who might be interested in your forum, but don't know you enough to trust you with an actual email account.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am not a paying subscriber and I have access to Addressguard. I love it, I use it for everything I register for. It's also not linked to your actual account in any way. The addresses are in the format "basename-something@yahoo.com". The basename is common to all of your addressguard addresses (mine is "azilanen"), and the part following the dash can be anything you want. My yahoo ID is something totally different, and I only give that out to friends.
It's interesting because it allows you to have unlimited addresses so you can see which forums/sites the spammers are getting your email address from.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
how do I filter the spam being sent me thru such utilities?
I don't want Big Brother netizens at slashdot having my real e-mail address.
So I used this service and a throwaway address just to register.
I highly recommend it. AAA+++ would use again
posted as Anonymous cos I can't remember my password.
Change your profile picture to a picture of a penis. In my experience, your account will be deleted within 48 hours.
As terrible as that is, that's brilliant.
Review: http://email.about.com/cs/dispaddrrevs/tp/disposab le.htm
Personally, I use http://www.emailias.com/, which has worked great for me. It also lets me use my own domains, and seems to have just about all the other options others are mentioning.
No, what he's done is ban a service that will undoubtedly be abused to spam his forums.
"LOL GMAIL YAHOO PERMANANCE!"
Erm, idiots, are you all? You report a spamming account to Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail, it gets shut down. Much like having a hacked system spewing spam for long enough, it gets shut down.
SPAMMERS DO NOT GO FOR PERMANANCE - NOR DO THEY HAVE TO. The only thing they are concerned with is delivering a shitload of mail and getting the hell out so they can spam from somewhere else.
I made a spam catcher email address years ago just to register with websites. I thought I might be receiving all kinds of junk email at that email address, but I've received less on that one than from my normal email address.
On the other hand, the 10 minute email address sounds great for asking ransom for kidnap victims and stuff. LOL.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
I just use Craigslist. Create a fake ad looking to buy a 2007 BMW for $100, Craigslist issues you an anon redirect email address, expires after a couple of weeks. Voila.
rooooar
...you can do it just as easily.
I configure one e-mail address per site/usage for my domain, named accordingly but with an 'anti-guess' element e.g. slashdot-123@... This way, if I start to get spam on any address, I can simply reconfigure that single address on my domain and change the address at the one site (or delete it altogether if I no longer require it) and, voila, no more spam or unwanted mail.
It adds about two minutes extra to the registration process for a site, but it's worth it. Of course, using an I.S.P. with good spam/virus/etc. filtering helps too!
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Why don't you read the myspace terms and conditions etc and try and break every single one in a post on your myspace page. Put something nasty about Rupert Murdoch and Fox in there just to make sure.
Then send an email to myspace saying john doe has offensive material etc on their page. It felt great when I deleted my myspace and friendster accounts.
save the GNUs!
P.S. I'm a big fan of spamgourmet and have been using it for years. I recommend it to everyone who asks about spam or registration web pages that require valid email addresses. I've even done a little work toward creating a servlet/filter that generates timestamped and requester IP address encoded mailto links so that any harvested email addresses that are subsequently used for spamming can be linked back to the harvester when reporting abuse.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
You are wasting your time, every country has tons of free email addresses. Might as well give up now.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Christ people, http://www.spamgourmet.com/ has been doing this for over 6 fucking years!
Sure a 6 month or a 1 year dupe is possible, but over half a fucking decade?
Is Slashdot going to re-annouce the release of Windows 2000?
Fuckety shit fuck!
Ok I feel better now...
I prefer Sneakemail.com. It lets me keep the "temporary" address for as long as I want. I have a different address for every single web service. If one of them starts spamming me, then I can permanently delete that address.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
As the owner of numerous sites, I have to say that it is a problem to have so many free e-mail sites that allow users to just sign up and throw away the account. There is a reason that sites require valid e-mail addresses to register.... for accountability and need-of-contact situations. If a site requires a valid e-mail address and has an activation system and all... please take a clue and realize that maybe there's a reason for this.
Now, if you're going around signing up for free X-box and iPod pyramid schemes... the problem isn't that you need a toss-away e-mail account to do this with, but rather you need a new hobby.
The last thing that legit online forum and chat mediums need are more smurfs and trolls. I (and I'm sure others) wish that the internet would evolve slightly such that people have a main e-mail account and don't go around being a pain in the ass or being overly paranoid about receiving spam from signing up everywhere.
The solution to dodging spam is to go after the spammers, not dodge their spam.
The guy who posted below me, the one who says he is the 'owner' of several sites, claims that thy need the info for contact issues. Hmmmmm..... One has to ask, though, where exactly the spammers get their supply of email addresses FROM..... sites just like his. Yeah, we believe you.....
Spam-And-Eggers like him are the hosts that the spammers feed off of, and most likely pay off in return for massive lists of email addresses that they can add to their already massive lists of email targets.
The main reason that site owners don't like disappearing email lists is that the emails are non-existant by the time they try to sell the lists to spammers. Additioanlly, no spammer is going to want to do business with someone who is supplying them with non-existant email addresses. Now that spammers have become wary of disappearing addresses, the value for such lists will go down, since it can now be expected that more and more of the addresses on the list are non-existant.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The easiest way to delete your myspace account is to just fill it with porn and then report it ;P
"Don't ask me, i'm just a girl"
Gmail lets you filter on basically anything you want. To implement the GP's suggestion, you would:
Give out your "real people" email address as xant+hello@gmail.com
Give out your "websites" email address as xant+thinkgeek_is_a_damn_spammer@gmail.com (for example)
Set gmail to allow xant+hello to pass through the Inbox.
Set gmail to drop xant@gmail.com and xant+*@gmail.com into the spambox.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
It occurs to me that you could even have a REALLY public email address that passed through gmail's filters properly.
The problem I have in mind is that I participate in (not just lurk on) several mailing lists. When I post, my email address is out there for spammers to find, eventually: gmane.org, among others, is a great place to harvest emails. What can I do about this? I actually want to get email on that address (the list itself) but I don't want spam to get through.
The solution:
- implement the post I just made, above.
- Sign up on the mailing list as xant+mailinglist@gmail.com (you may want to get more specific about which mailing list, but it's not really necessary)
- Set gmail to keep (or label and move) email matching To:xant+mailinglist@gmail.com AND From:(the real mailing list address)
- Set gmail to spambucket To:xant+mailinglist@gmail.com that isn't from the real mailing list.
True, it's possible to for a spammer to forge the From address, but that doesn't seem to happen very often. At least, in the lists where I participate.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
It is designed strictly for recieving email you don't want.
Is there any service strictly designed for not receiving the email I don't want?
paintball
Mailshell http://www.mailshell.com/, a commerical offering, has in the past offered limited (10MB) accounts with throwaway e-mail addresses. It will accept any e-mail to whatever@yourname.mailshell.com, and you can approve or reject any such e-mails. I've been using it for years very effectively. I don;t get anything for the plug; it's just a very nice service.
Although the idea for these type of emails is good, I think that it is ignoring a problem. ANYBODY that ever gets your email should NEVER give away that email unless they let you know. A possible solution to offenders would be a $1 million dollar fine, being tarred and feathered, then having all of the offenders personal information available to the general public for lifetime :D
That's basically what they've been for, for many years now. Back in the day hotmail was alright but not it's just a nice web based spambucket for website registration.
Sure, alot of sites have started to "not allow" public email sites like hotmail or yahoo to be used for registration. generally the rule of thumb for those sites is A) they are just too uptight about registration in the first place so going out-of-your-way to sign up must be really really worth it or a waste of time and B) that site that requires that tends to be plagued with people signing up tons of dummy accounts for any number of reasons (spamming, abusing the number of registrations per user, etc). While the second is more forgivable, the first is just the webmaster being lazy. I'm not going to use my ISP email for your basic web forum registration, nor am I using my Gmail account for most things like that either.
Worst comes to worst, you start Googling web mail services till you find one thats obscure, has been around a while and won't be going anywhere anytime soon, so you can register for sites anonymously and still have the email there later for password reminder if needed.
Aw Frell this
I do the same....
Except I configured a recipent blacklist in Postfix for blacklisting certain addresses...
The REGEX textfile database is really powerful... I use regular expressions to define acceptable or blacklisted recipents. For example, I can allow all catchall-recipents sent to "NOSPAM_xxx@mydomain.com" [Recently did this to filter out the bounce messages from spammers who use random characters before the @]
You can also define a personalized rejection message for each address....
You might find this useful if you use spamassassin.... I was getting several hundred spams per hour recently... With spamassassin this was a bit taxing.
Since when were throw away email addresses hard?
Just use Gmail and invite yourself to Gmail whenever you need a new email address.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root
bloglines aggregates all incoming e-mails in separate RSS feeds, removes attachments and shows them accordingly
... the RFC lets your mail server do whatever the heck it wants to the stuff after the + part. In GMail's case, if you strip off the +whatever you end up with the base mail address. In my case, if you strip off the +whatever you just got /dev/nulled (trashaccount+trustedmailer@mydomain.com gets redirected to my inbox, trashaccount@mydomain.com does not) I really hope GMail keeps doing it their way because mydomain.com receives a heck of a lot less email than they do and if the spammers ignore me to focus on their bigger fish, yay. Anyhow, my GMail address doesn't get any spam and I don't see that changing as I take care to protect it.
Sidenote: does.this.screw.people.up.or.what@gmail.com Honestly, its like they can't write regular expressions which will process a period in the user name. That isn't my real address, incidentally.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
2prong actually puts the new email address in your clipboard (copies it) automatically - all you have to do is paste it.
This works, but things such as invites, forwards, e-cards that your friends send you with good intentions still mess things up. I had a good clean 3-year run with my last address, but lately it's just spiraled out of control.
That's why I don't give my friends my e-mail address. They couldn't understand why forwards and evites and e-cards were BAD, so I had to change my e-mail address and cut them out of my circle.
I've always used spambob.org for things like this. They have plenty of different addresses and domains to choose from depending on exactly -how- disposable of an email address you want.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
I wonder why nobody mentioned the following Firefox extension: Temporary inbox (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2650/). It allows to work with disposable emails in one mouse click from the toolbar (well, maybe, two: one for email generation and one for checking).
I just log into mailinator with random usernames - always fun to see what people signed up to without wanting to leave an email trail.
An alternative to TMM (and a precursor to other disposable-address-and-delivering-to-your-mail) : http://www.spamgourmet.com/
For sites that block mailinator, you can try out a Swedish site (use with moderation, please): http://www.slaskpost.se/
(it's in Swedish, but you should be able to get by as it is quite similar to mailinator except for the captcha)
I've also used it with great luck on sourceforge.
I had a project up there that I really didn't want to let live (it was old, ugly and I was selling a competing version), but sourceforge doesn't remove projects, ever.
Well, the solution turned out to be to complain that the project wasn't open source (it had lots of files that didn't contain the GPL header, it they weren't technically covered by the GPL).
That project was gone in 30 minutes:)
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Hows did this make the "news" section?
Mailinator?
Dodgeit.com?
Mytrashmail.com?
Mailexpire.com?
Spamhole.com?
These are the ones i can think of off the top of my head. Why not write a nice article about DRM or "[Some Product] killer!"
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
From 2Prong's main page (warning, don't click that):
Oh, thank you, thank you so much for mucking about with my clipboard without my permission.
I've had one of these since 1996. It's called Hotmail. I know /. submissions have gotten lax lately, but jesus, this is decades old news.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
who mails you then, your enemies? or maybe the joke was too subtle for me ;)
Or you could use spamhole who came up with this idea years ago and not download anything and setup is only about 1 min rahter then 10.
I stumbled upon a site recently suggesting that plus-addressing is somehow a feature of GMail.
It is a feature of email, and although some web designers tell their forms not to accept "+" as part of an email address (doubtless due to a lack of ability to read the RFCs). It is not specific to GMail.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I have a domain name just for emails. I just create names on the fly and use the catchall. This way I find out whose sharing my address. for example, I have amazon@domain, cafepress@domain, slashdot@domain, etc. If I find one thats being used by spammers, all spam will be forwarded to the specific customer service email address for a few days before I delete the domain and auto delete all email to that address. Its solved alot of problems.
I tink spammotel gives you a better service...
in 2 words, spammotel is a simple service that lets you create all the emails you want, and all these fake-email will be forwarded to your real-mailbox.
the fake-mail will look something like this: ABCDEFGHIJKL@spammotel.com for example... you register to a service with spammotel-email, then decide it is not what you were looking for, and you just delete your spammotel-email, so you don't leave any trace, and you don't have to worry of spam... when a mail gets spam, you delete it and create a new one... easy.
the only problem is that you can't send mail with the spammotel account... well, unless you configure a bit your mail client or send mailk with some "anonimous" service on the web, which permits to specify the sender...
TemporaryInbox does the same thing, and comes with a Firefox extension to haste the matter.
I swear first I see a story up on Reddit. Next day it is on Digg. Then like 3-4 days later it shows up on Slashdot.
Explains why I visit this site so much less now.
-A
Spamex has done this quite well for years.
Tom Geller
Yahoo! Mail let's you do this.
I see people talking about gmail's similar solution. The difference is that with Yahoo! Mail the prefix MUST be different than your regular email address... which means that, unless they can tie both emails together through other means, they can't just strip away the suffix portion.
Unique Email Addresses are a good idea in general, but don't fool yourself in thinking that a web site operator can't tie you back to your IP or based on the physical address or other information you give them in order to know that you are using multiple email addresses that all point back to you.
I am really not clear about the problem with having a spare address on Gmail/yahoo/whatever just for registration. Someone asked the same thing somewhere above and was told it would get out of control very fast. I have been using three dummy addresses (2 yahoo and one lycos) for all the stupid registrations, for 4 years now. Never had a problem with any of them. I can get back to them if I really need to read a mail (e.g if I forget the password to some forum account).
If you do not check the account for a long time (~3 months in yahoo and similar in lots of others) then they just suspend your account till you reactivate it (all your mails are deleted but then they were not important to begin with) Moreover, if you forgot a password to some forum/board, you can just get it to mail you at that same address after reactivation so the risk factor is zero. Most of the mail provider (except hotmail) use decent spam filters so the inbox is decently readable even when you have to hunt for some particular mail.
Someone said that people can sniff your surfing/purchasing habits if you use a single mail id on all of them. First of all, do you really provide real personal information when creating email addresses? Who cares if someone can gather all that info and tie it to a person who does not exists. Secondly, if you are really paranoid, why would you use a single mail address for surfing and purchasing contact addresses ?
Am I missing something obvious here or people are just excited about disposable addresses because they don't like registering different accounts on webmail providers? I did not even have to create a different dummy Gmail account when Gmail came on to the scene and I totally shifted to it for webmails, because the old three worked so well for me.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Nice that you actually can email nice letters like ÅÄÖ and (OK, Slashdot can't handle Russian characters? What is this? 1994?), but if you answer with stuff that isn't English letters, they become messed up.
So this is a good example of: USE UTF-8 DAMN IT! How hard can it be?
By the way: "10minutemail.com" is of course banned to use as an email-address on my sites now.
10 minute email is the best thing I've seen in a long time. I've only used it a couple of times but I'm sold. I think a service like this is valuable enough to warrant a reasonable subscription fee. I was just poking around the site hoping to find a way to late them know what I think of their idea. I hope they see this on /.