Online services almost always require you to give them an email address to sign up. This requirement used to be useful for stopping people from signing up many times (as normally people only have one email address), while these services usually won’t send you much more than a ‘Thank you for signing up’ message; the wrong service could get your email address into a spam list (which is never a good thing – most of the time its irreversible)
The easy solution to this is disposable email address services (my favourite is Mailinator). These services allow you to create an email address that you can use for signing up to a web service… and then not ever need to worry about checking that address again (ignoring any future emails or potential spam from the service).
Mailinator works by simply accepting emails from any address @mailinator.com. Every address links to a seperate mail box (For example, emails to ‘josh@mailinator.com’ are publicly viewable at http://josh.mailinator.com). Mailinator deletes mail after a few hours so while it isn’t private, for signing up for simple web services, it can serve as an effective tool to avoid the associated spam.
A trick I use is I point mailinator@mydomain.co.za to lusionjosh@mailinator.com (this is easy to do from the mail section of your control panel)… I then bookmark http://lusionjosh.mailinator.com so I can easily access the mails. This stops a trick where website developers will block email addresses @mailinator.com in an attempt to get you not to use disposable email addresses to sign up.
The Mailinator service can also be used off the web, such as signing up for competitions / giving email addresses at events if they promise to send you an email – although you better watch what time you’re expecting the email or it might be deleted by mailinator before you get to read it.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
You migtwant to take a look at http://www.soodonims.com.
It provides disposable email addresses that will help to prevent spam from ever reaching your inbox. Its advantage over mailinator, is that you can control when the email vanihes.