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April 07, 2005
Disposable email address
On this morning's Jon Faine Show, a listener asked about the possibility of sending email anonymously to defeat hackers. We explained that it's not generally regarded as good etiquette. But there are times when a disposable email address would be handy - say for when you have to register at a Web site you don't particularly trust.
Pookmail is quite brilliant for that. Just pick an address - dontbotherme@pookmail.com for instance - and use that. You can log in and read any emails, even save them if you like, otherwise they're wiped from the system after 24 hours.
We picked up the idea from LifeHacker, which is also an interesting site. Sony just paid $US75,000 to sponsor it for three months.
Posted by cw at April 7, 2005 11:39 AM
Comments
mailinator.com has been around a lot longer and I have used it successfully many times. It is not in beta, and at least the guy can spell/speak English!
Exactly the same service - you make up a name on the spot and add "@mailinator.com" Then login at www.mailinator.com to get your email.
Better still for filling in online registrations, download the BugMeNot plugin for Firefox, then when faced with a registration just right click and choose BugMeNot from the menu that appears. If someone has previously registered for that site (and has taken the time to make their login public on the BugMeNot service) then it automatically completes their user name and password and away you go. I'm amazed at how many sites it works for, although obviously only for free registration.
You will be interested to know cw that The Age online has a tricky way of getting around this - namely by asking you to repeat the login (which of course you can't do because the password consists of asterixes and using BugMeNot again inserts the next available user name/password combination. Sneaky buggers - imagine trying to outsmart their free-loading customers like that!
Regards, Edgy.
Posted by: Edgy at April 7, 2005 01:11 PM