Throwaway e-mail sites

When signing up for online registration at various websites, there are a few different thoughts. For your internet bank, you want to use real information since it is crucial that you get the information they send you. At the other end of the spectrum, there are blogs on which you can just make up random e-mail addresses that aren't even real (or in the case of Spamblogging now, due to popular demand, you don't need to enter info at all).

Those are easy enough, but then there is the middle ground. Usually these are sites like the New York Times where there is arguably content there that you want to see, and that content is free, but you need to register in order to see it.
Your first inclination might be to just make up an e-mail address, but that won't work in this case because they frequently send a confirmation e-mail back to you. This is both good and bad - good in that they are making sure you really want to register and someone isn't falsely using your address. And bad in that they are making sure it is a real address and not something you just dumped in.

So what you want is a temporary e-mail that will work long enough for you to exchange these e-mails and click on the links they send, and then after that be done with it.

That is where services like spamgourmet come in. It does exactly that. A free temporary e-mail that then dies after a few messages.

I am sure there are many more - I happened to post up about this particular one just because I only now ran across it myself. I am not saying it is any better/worse than any other sites, and it is free as far as I can tell, so it isn't like I am shilling for the thing.

The main reason of this post is 1) to get the concept out there to those of you that haven't heard of it (here is a recent Wired article that talks about why it might be a good thing to reduce spam), and also to solicit links from our readers to other free services similar to this.

Posted by Eric at July 20, 2004 09:33 AM | TrackBack