So, at the small company I work for, I generally perform any duties remotely related to technology. (Sort of scary… but I digress.) Anyway, we’ve been having a major problem with spam-clogged company accounts. The biggest offender is one of my colleagues, who feels compelled to sign up for every shitty service under the sun with her company email address, despite the fact that I have repeatedly and pointedly told the staff not to do that. I have explained, in detail and at length, how signing up with one of these asshat services typically results in spam proliferating at a remarkable rate as email addy lists get sold from here to kingdom come, resulting in inboxes clogged by evil, and taking up inordinate amounts of my time to keep things cleared. (I have to do it, the staff will not and then they bitch about not being able to get email because their inbox is full. :rolleyes: I would let it go to teach them a lesson, except that we tend to miss important communications then.) A week ago, I allowed myself a small feeling of triumph as said colleague tells me that she’s finally set up a Yahoo address for herself now and will use that for her daily joke lists, etc.
Now, I personally have two email addresses meant specifically for potentially spam-inducing stuff on the web. I have several others used for various purposes, but I almost never use them for online sign-up stuff, and they’ve stayed clean. Until now.
You see, my colleague decided that I simply had to be informed about some stupid contest on one of her favorite joke websites by using the “refer a friend” feature. I guess she thought she was being good using one of my personal addresses, rather than the company one, but still… I could tell from the subject that I wouldn’t be interested and so didn’t even bother opening the mail (hoping also that my addy would therefore not be validated). Too late. In the five days since I got her referral email, I’ve received nearly 60 pieces of spam to a formerly spam-free account.
Jesus H. Christ… when somebody tells you repeatedly what you have to do to avoid getting on spammers’ lists, and bitches to you about the amount of time it takes to get rid of all this crap, what possesses you to do the very thing that will guarantee the other person will get more spam??
My provider gave me an address, and I signed up for a hotmail account on top of that, using hotmail as my spam-magnet and keeping my provider account pristine. Then I found out my provider had sold its own user list to the spammers and now I get “casin0” and “v!agra” ads galore.
Yeah, you gotta have a spam-collector throwaway address.
www.spamhole.com is interesting; it lets you make a temporary email address that can expire in as little as an hour. It forwards mail send to the spamhole address to your real address. Then if the spamhole address gets on a spam list, it doesn’t matter. It’s dead in an hour anyway. (You can make it last as 72 hours)
Problem is, some signups recognize and reject spamhole addresses now.
We don’t allow spamhole or spamgourmet or any other temporary addresses for registration here, either. We want a valid email address, and in five years or so, we’ve only sent out 3 emails, I believe. Two of the emails were when we got hacked, and we wanted to let people know about the breach in security. One email was when we went to a subscription basis. I really don’t think that ANY of those emails count as spam.
But you don’t know when you first sign up to something if it’s going to be OK like the SDMB, or shit like most other things. And when you finally know, it’s too late and your address is fucked. Unless you used Spamhole or whatever.
And it ain’t messages from a board that that I’m complaing about, it’s ads for “mort.gages” and “Vi@gra” after the board or whatever you signed up with sell their email list Dirtbag Fuck Spam, Inc.
There’s one better than that: www.mailinator.com
There is absolutely no signup or preparation or anything necessary. Just give your email address as “whateveryouwant@mailinator.com” and then go to their site when you wish to check your mail.
Try it right now – before you go to their site, send something to some totally random username followed by “@mailinator.com” and then go check the mail for that username.
Of course, I wouldn’t dream of using such a tool when dealing with a reputable site such as the SDMB
I had a friend who had all the skits comitted to memory, and he could do them in voice too. I have to admit I thought of him after I posted.
Spamhole and Mailinator are good ideas, but I despair of being able to get the folks on staff to use them. It’s odd and a bit frustrating… they ARE bright people, just not when it comes to computing issues, apparently. Just last Thursday, I also discovered that my memos about choosing good passwords were in vain as well. My afore-mentioned colleague was not only using her email address AND password as her login ID and password at a number of web sites, but she was also using the same password for her WinXP administrator-level login AND had given said password to a couple of our part-timers “just in case they needed to do something that required administrator access,” so as not to disturb her. :smack: When I explained yet again why that was not a good idea, she whined, “But I HATE having to remember so many different passwords!”
Cool, thanks. But I like Spamhole’s feature where it forwards email from the spamhole account to my real address. Mailinator isn’t really any less work, it just puts the “work” in having to visit the web page afterwards, instead of before. After you set up the spamhole account (which is only like 4 fields to fill out) you never have to go back to the website.
Sounds like these tools fit slightly different niches.
Mailinator is really meant for that one-time throwaway account you need to cough up when you are on page 22 of that Form From Hell and they insist on an address where to send your license key.
I have even used it to test an application that needed to broadcast e-mails for various events – it was so much easier to direct the messages there and then go to see if it worked rather than to have to have configured lots of test accounts beforehand.
