Monday, November 27, 2006

Fighting Spam with Disposable Emails


Very often we come across sites that requires you to provide email address to receive their services, mostly they use it for verification purposes. But the very next day your inbox starts flooding with spams and then you decide to end your life(?). Surely your email address is leaked and sold to professional spammers following the age old business mantra "everythings fair in love and cyber world".

Fortunately, or rather driven by the need, of late some sites has come up with disposable email concept to fight the spammers. The sites provide email addresses which remain active for a limited time mostly a day or week, or limit the number of emails after which they expire. Some of them are full featured while others receive only. Almost all of them are no frills and let you create email adresses on the fly. Here are some of the sites that provide disposable email services:

  • DodgeIt- no registration required, provides RSS feeds, receive-only.

  • E4ward- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, allows multiple aliases of an account.

  • GreenSloth- no registration required, receive-only, e-mail expires automatically after a week.
  • KasMail- requires registration, allows up to 25 aliases, can set aliases to expire after a certain amount of time.

  • Jetable- provides mail forwarding, account autoexpires after certain amount of time.

  • Mailinator- no registration required, provides handy spam map, receive-only, e-mail expires automatically after a few hours.

  • MailNull- requires registration, provides mail forwarding.

  • PookMail- no registration required, very simple to use.

  • SneakeMail- requires registration, provides mail forwarding.

  • SpamDay- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, account is automatically destroyed after 24 hours of opening.

  • SpamGourmet- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, can create custom aliases which automatically expire after a certain number of e-mails received.

  • Spam.la- no registration required, no frills. You can see all spam being sent to all Spam.la accounts, or just your own.

  • SpamMotel- requires registration, provides mail forwarding, mail can be accessed through desktop e-mail clients, can reply to e-mail from your real e-mail address using SpamMotel e-mail.

  • TempInbox- no registration required, provides RSS and Atom feeds, receive only, supports many different languages.

  • Will Hack for Food- requires registration, account expires after user indicated period of time, best name ever.

    • 2 comments:

      Anonymous said...

      mailinator has RSS feeds too

      Prashant Kr Singh said...

      Thanks for pointing that out. RSS really should be handy for keeping track of the mails, more so because Mailinator gives you an autogenerated addresss which is difficult to remember.