Spam-fighting E-mail and How To Use It
April 17th, 2008 by 
privacyoriented
…and Other General Privacy-Friendly E-mail Tips
You can fight back very effectively whenever you’re filling out of those forms on the internet that want you to disclose your name and other information about yourself that you may feel is none of their business, and you know they don’t need it to provide you the service but you want their service. It’s easy too!
The first thing to remember, of course, is that you don’t have to give them real information in most cases. Now, this may be a violation of their Terms in some cases, but sometimes it is not and reality has it that it’s near impossible for them to verify your information. Most of the time, all they want your information for is marketing, and who wants junkmail? So you can just put in “Joe Blow” and “123 Main St.” and all that good stuff. If it’s on a corporate or government form, I usually claim I don’t have an e-mail address. That’s just one less piece of information they have on me. I suggest you do the same whenever possible.
Sometimes you need an e-mail address and you need your e-mail address to work so you can use the service. You have to be able to get e-mail from these people. There are various services that you can use instead of giving them your real e-mail address however.
The first and easiest option is to give them a “disposable” e-mail address. If you don’t mind others being able to read these e-mails, you can give any e-mail address with the following domain names after the @ symbol:
- Mailinator.com
- PookMail.com
- TemporaryInbox.com
- SlopsBox.com
- Dodgit.com
- Guerrilla Mail
- UnDisposable.net
- BlockFilter
- SlopsBox
Then just go to the corresponding website, put that address in and you can read any e-mail they sent you right there.
For example, you could just make up TheCrackFox123925091501@mailinator.com and put that in the form you are filling out to sign up for, say, BayWords.com. Then just go to www.mailinator.com and type TheCrackFox123925091501 into the login there and you can see and read any e-mail sent to that address lately. Nifty trick, eh? Just FYI, I prefer www.pookmail.com. Mailinator.com is blocked on some sites because it is becoming better known.
Next we have free, temporary e-mail forwarding to your real inbox. With this, you can type in a pre-arranged junk e-mail address and it will forward all that e-mail to your real e-mail address for a pre-defined amount of time. The services that you can setup a forwarding address with are the following:
Many of these have the option of using some generic domain name too. For example, TemporaryForwarding.com will let you use mx0.wwwnew.eu, bodhi.lawlita.com or mail.htl22.at as the domain name of your new e-mail forwarding or temp address.
Those are pretty good techniques for limiting spam from the companies you sign up for services with.
While I’m on the topic, I suppose I’ll briefly go into sending anonymous e-mails. Sometimes I want to send anonymous e-mails, just “one-offs,” to various organizations or to myself for later retrieval but I don’t want to or can’t log into my webmail account. So here’s what I do…
I just go to one of the following sites and send a free, anonymized e-mail that doesn’t even require making an account. You can just type in the recipient and message and send away…
The last one there is an “Anonymous Remailer.”
Another similar method of info-sending can be had through:
…although that’s a tad more complicated. That one will just send your e-mail recipient a password to get access to an encrypted webpage with your message on it.
That’s about it for now. Enjoy the links. 
P.S. …and just a little nugget of fuzziness for your noggin: MySpace does not need your real e-mail address. I signed up once with something similar to not-an-e-mailaddy@not-an-e-mailaddy123.com (obviously not real), and I can still login to this day. No need for confirmation, but if they ever change that, you can use a temporary e-mail address. 
Posted in Online Privacy, Original Content | 