Spam Forwarding
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I just got this idea about temporary mail addresses, and googled for the existing ones. I came across this one:
<font size="-1">To avoid spam, jetable.org provides you with a temporary email address. As soon as it is created, all the emails sent to this address are forwarded to your ...
www.jetable.org/en/index</font>It does sound tempting to get all spam forwarded to your own address doesn't it? :-)
David
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Destroy the address, and the spam stops coming. And you don't need to deal with a new "true" e-mail service, just this forwarder. Works for me. shrug
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[quote user="David L"]
<font size="-1">To avoid spam, jetable.org provides you with a temporary email address. As soon as it is created, all the emails sent to this address are forwarded to your ...
www.jetable.org/en/index</font>It does sound tempting to get all spam forwarded to your own address doesn't it? :-)
[/quote]
I think you missed the point. It's a temporary
address. You use it to receive the email containing the
registration code or activation link for whatever you just downloaded
or registered at, then it expires. After it's gone, you won't be
getting any forwarded spam.The real WTF is that you
didn't read the very next line of the website, but took a guess at how
it worked based on the snippet shown on a google search result.
The site is currently down but the google cache version is still there.After all, for all you know, that sentence could have continued...
<font size="-1">To avoid spam, jetable.org provides you with a temporary email address. As soon as it is created, all the emails sent to this address are forwarded to your ...
</font>... personal choice of /dev/null, car-crusher, flame-thrower, or a big scary hungry monster that crunches them up between its slavering fangs.
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Hmm yes, if it would say that, my not reading it would be a WTF in itself. I tried to imagine every possible reasonable ending of that sentence though, and couldn't figure out anything useful. To clear things up:
I don't see the point of having a new trash mail address if it forwards everything to you regular email. If you use a temp e-mail as spamshield, then I suggest reading the ones you really want and forwarding them to yourself manually. If it is done automatically, you will get a lot of shit for a while, and when you close it down the shit stops coming, but so does the good stuff (the things you DO want forwarded).
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@David L said:
Hmm yes, if it would say that, my not reading it would be a WTF in itself. I tried to imagine every possible reasonable ending of that sentence though, and couldn't figure out anything useful. To clear things up:
I don't see the point of having a new trash mail address if it forwards everything to you regular email. If you use a temp e-mail as spamshield, then I suggest reading the ones you really want and forwarding them to yourself manually. If it is done automatically, you will get a lot of shit for a while, and when you close it down the shit stops coming, but so does the good stuff (the things you DO want forwarded).The point here is that when you subscribe to something you want the initial mails (passwords and such), but you don't need what may come next ("promotion" emails or your address being sold to a spammer) so you get a temp address valid for 12 or 24h to get the mail you need, and then the address dies by itself and you don't get the spam.
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That actually sounds like a good idea. Although it's easier to just use a separate spam-only email account from yahoo, etc.
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[quote user="David L"]
Hmm yes, if it would say that, my not reading it would be a WTF in itself. I tried to imagine every possible reasonable ending of that sentence though, and couldn't figure out anything useful. To clear things up:
I don't see the point of having a new trash mail address if it forwards everything to you regular email. If you use a temp e-mail as spamshield, then I suggest reading the ones you really want and forwarding them to yourself manually. If it is done automatically, you will get a lot of shit for a while, and when you close it down the shit stops coming, but so does the good stuff (the things you DO want forwarded).[/quote]
That is not the point of a temporary email address. The key word is temporary, you know. If you want an alternate email address to check now and then and use to sign up for stuff and to manually forward things along, then that is something completely different.
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[quote user="masklinn"][quote user="David L"]
Hmm yes, if it would say that, my not reading it would be a WTF in itself. I tried to imagine every possible reasonable ending of that sentence though, and couldn't figure out anything useful. To clear things up:I don't see the point of having a new trash mail address if it forwards everything to you regular email. If you use a temp e-mail as spamshield, then I suggest reading the ones you really want and forwarding them to yourself manually. If it is done automatically, you will get a lot of shit for a while, and when you close it down the shit stops coming, but so does the good stuff (the things you DO want forwarded).
[/quote]
The point here is that when you subscribe to something you want the initial mails (passwords and such), but you don't need what may come next ("promotion" emails or your address being sold to a spammer) so you get a temp address valid for 12 or 24h to get the mail you need, and then the address dies by itself and you don't get the spam.
[/quote]The way I do it is to setup different email addresses for different things (e.g. tdwtfpaul@domain.com) for the main sites that I access so that if I should happen to get some spam that was directed to tdwtdpaul@domain.com, I know exactly who/where I need to send the killer-suicide-death-assassin squads. If it's a trivial registration, I just put in a bogus email address. You might say "Gosh, that'd be a lot of email addresses to keep track of and an irritating process each time to access something" - but I don't worry about that. I don't sign up for every website I stumble upon. If I've got a problem and some website will only let me have an answer with a login that's verified but I only need it one time, I find another website.
<copyrighted, trademarked, patent-pending>
I do like the auto-expire forward concept though - that's got some potential!! If only you could set it up for auto-add+auto-expire, that'd be king. So the first time I get an email to paul003@domain.com, it would create the forward acct on the fly, deliver the email, and keep it open for 12-24h (or configurable), then shut it down. I would set my own rules for auto-creatable emails (like must contain paul followed by 3 numbers). What would be good would be to have it work based on the domain. So I could set up an account at some website and use an email address like paul_tdwtf@domain.com and it would auto-gen the alias, etc.. Then I could really track where it came from.
</copyrighted, trademarked, patent-pending>Anyone good with sendmail mods??
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[quote user="pauluskc"]<copyrighted, trademarked, patent-pending>
I do like the auto-expire forward concept though - that's got some potential!! If only you could set it up for auto-add+auto-expire, that'd be king. So the first time I get an email to paul003@domain.com, it would create the forward acct on the fly, deliver the email, and keep it open for 12-24h (or configurable), then shut it down. I would set my own rules for auto-creatable emails (like must contain paul followed by 3 numbers). What would be good would be to have it work based on the domain. So I could set up an account at some website and use an email address like paul_tdwtf@domain.com and it would auto-gen the alias, etc.. Then I could really track where it came from.
</copyrighted, trademarked, patent-pending>Anyone good with sendmail mods??[/quote]
That's basically how [url=http://www.spamgourmet.com/]spamgourmet[/url] works, only you have an address like tdwtf.3.paul@spamgourmet.com (or about a dozen other domains), and the address expires after a certain number of messages are sent to it (in this case, 3), instead of after an amount of time. (As you should be able to grasp, "tdwtf" is the name of the address, "3" is the number of messages that can be sent to it before it expires and "paul" is your username. "3" can be anything you want. If it's a word, the position in the alphabet of the first letter of it is used (the first letter of "foo" is "f", and that's the sixth letter in the alphabet, so 6 messages). I like to take advantage of that to use addresses like thedailywtf.com.me@spamgourmet.com.)
(WTF. The creators of this horrendous forum software should be slapped. No preview, so I don't know if that link will work, and Ctrl+Shift+Z (redo) does not work, though Ctrl+Z (undo) does. The WTFiness of Community Server continues to amaze me.)
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Post edit time limit? Crap. I like editing my posts. I wanted to remove the details about "3" and change the domain to example.com so any "paul" or "me" spamgourmet users couldn't get three spams if those two addresses were harvested.
