Mailinator has a new feature
Our email addresses are precious. My 5,166 spam messages received per day show the importance of good stewardship of our addresses. But there are lots of times when you might want someone to contact you later: you meet someone at a party you maybe/maybe-don’t like, or you enter a contest for a free Audi — whatever — and you want a “no-commitment” email address to use. Bingo, in steps Mailinator. Think up any old claptrap address (such as, say, anyoldclaptrap@mailinator.com) and go back to check it once or twice, or when the contest is scheduled to end, or whatever. If it gets swamped with spam, or the guy/girl at the party ends up to be psycho, c-ya! No commitment: walk away from the address and never look back.
In the example above, the anyoldclaptrap@mailinator.com, some robots are going to come breezing through mcgees.org and pick up that email address, and add it to spam lists. Bookmark this post and check back in a week or so to see if I’m right. As I write this, the mailbox is empty. To check it, go to Mailinator, enter in your mailbox name (anyoldclaptrap), and see your/my/our mail. Voila!
Problem is, everyone else can see your mail, too. So if you want a throwaway address to use for a while, on multiple sites, pick something longish and complicated (anyoldclaptrap-4032470234 or whatever), and now, Mailinator will generate an alternate “To” address for the mailbox (in this case, M8R-gk4u4f@mailinator.com.) Now you can give that out, and there is no way to recover your actual address from it. Have your mail sent to M8R-gk4u4f@mailinator.com, check it at anyoldclaptrap-4032470234, and when you’re done or tired or swamped, just drop your drugs and walk away, fairly confident that no one else has read “your” emails (They could, of course, if they successfully guessed anyoldclaptrap-4032470234. But not likely. It’s just security through obfuscation, which is much better than no security at all.)
In other news, days are now one hour long:
Email subscription
March 30th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
The point to that image is, of course, that it needs to read “spam received so far this hour” and “spam received so far today”, and a time zone. Otherwise, people will (reasonably) assume they’re looking at a floating average over the last 60 minutes and 24 hours, respectively.
March 30th, 2008 at 10:42 pm