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Mailinator
02 Oct 2003 by Matthew Linderman
With Mailinator, you can avoid giving out your real email address when you are afraid of getting spammed. Instead, make up any address @mailinator.com on the spot and go check it later. The FAQ page may give you a chuckle as well.
Q: So Mailinator solves the Spam problem? A: Heck no. If it solved the spam problem it would probably be called IBMinator or MICROSOFTinator or something even catchier cuz we would have sold it and we’d be zillionaires off pursuing our real dream of helping nice people like Dr. Bahutu of Nigeria who keeps emailing us asking for our help transferring some funds…
Q: This sounds pretty insecure. What if I send important emails with sensitive super-secret information in them to mailinator? A: Then you are a stupid-head. That isn’t what this is for.
29 comments so far (Post a Comment)
02 Oct 2003 | Mike said...
Haha that's awesome... what I do is whenever I signup for a service or something that might sell my email address, I give them "fake" emails that automatically get forwarded my main account.
[email protected] for the NYTimes
[email protected] for Yahoo! Games
...
So when they start selling my addresses, I know exactly who ratted me out and I block that email address from now on ;)
02 Oct 2003 | chris said...
haha, Mike, that's pretty clever. so who's ratted you out in the past?
mailinator seems like a good idea, i may have to use it in the future.
02 Oct 2003 | dayvin said...
For minimal cost, you can also buy a "throwaway" domain name and do what Mike suggests.
BTW, Dr. Bahutu of Nigeria loves our info@ address at work.
02 Oct 2003 | Mike said...
Pepsi did, those bastards!
Also I get stupid advertising from Yahoo! a lot, its the cheesiest type of advertising too, but at the very bottom of it there's a "Yahoo! Advertising" banner just so I can pinpoint who to be upset with.
For SOME completely unknown reason, I get the most amount of spam addressed to "[email protected]", a very-much made up email address that gets forwarded to my account.
Its all personalized too, "Cameron, check out how much you can save", so I have no idea where they pulled it from.
02 Oct 2003 | Nick said...
Not wanting to let the nice Dr. Bahutu of Nigeria down, I kindly provided him with the sort code and account number that my telecom's provider had written on the back of my bill.
But I don't think he ever paid the bill.
02 Oct 2003 | JoeM said...
Hey,
Even better is Spam Gourmet ( http://www.spamgourmet.com ):: not quite the glitz and charm of Mailinator, but with about twice as much on the functionality side.
02 Oct 2003 | pb said...
spamgourmet is complete over-kill. mailiintor is elegantly simple.
03 Oct 2003 | dc said...
Or you could just hire a staff to handle your e-mail.
03 Oct 2003 | JoeM said...
Overkill? On spam? Hah, hardly. Sparmgourmet allows you to set up your account, then *never* go back to spamgourmet again while it blocks your spam . . . if you want. It's flexible.
With Mailinator, you have to go to their site to check it, which is an unnecessary step (unless you're them, and you want to find a way to profit off of this eventually) . . .
Basically, this has already been done. Better.
03 Oct 2003 | ~bc said...
For SOME completely unknown reason, I get the most amount of spam addressed to "[email protected]"
Mike,
You're probably getting hit with the dictionary Spam attack, they just take domains (eg, phark.com) and combined them with random names (eg, cameron, john, etc) and send email to those. So eventually they guess right, or you have an email like yours where you get anything at that's sent to any name @ your domain.
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