Posts Tagged ‘email addresses’

Generate Disposable Emails Addresses on the Fly

A while back I tal­ked about crea­ting dis­po­sa­ble email addres­ses for filling in forms online to help rid your email of new spam (97% of all email).  I found another tool to help with this fight.

If my logs are any indi­ca­tions, this Fire­fox thing might just catch on.  The rea­son I men­tion Fire­fox by name is because of the Add-ons.  In par­ti­cu­lar the Spamavert.com add-on.  Spa­ma­vert is another dis­po­sa­ble email address site that not only allows you to create an email address, but allows you to go back and retrieve the email for veri­fi­ca­tion purposes.

I have begun to play around with the add-on and am very impres­sed so far.  After down­loa­ding and ins­ta­lling the add-on it was smooth sai­ling.  With very few options, there is not much to do.  The only thing I chan­ged by going to the Tools -> Spa­ma­vert -> Options was the pre­fix.  I made it something uni­que to me OmaGk.  I made sure that I left the “Use Smart Alia­ses” chec­ked.  This fea­ture will put your pre­fix with an iden­ti­fier pulled out of the address of the site you are using it one (NyTime for the New York Times).

Now that it is all con­fi­gu­red, I am ready to go.  I went to the NY Times site and regis­te­red, on the email address field, I used a right click -> paste spam­vert address.  That’s it.  After the address is pas­ted in, a new tab ope­ned up with to spa­ma­vert site that will notify if an email comes in.  An entry is also made under the spa­ma­vert tool area that also pro­vi­des a direct link to check for the con­fir­ma­tion email.

So it sounds good to you and you are won­de­ring how do you get this add-on:

For Fire­fox 3.0.* and below: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4533

For Fire­fox 3.5 beta: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/4533?advancedsearch=1.  You will have to sign up for a Mozi­lla Add-ons account.

What does your email address say about you?

In today’s inter­con­nec­ted world it is ama­zing how much can be found about you with very little infor­ma­tion.  I am not tal­king something pri­vate like your social secu­rity num­ber, I am tal­king about something you give out all the time.  Your Email Address.

Your email address is the one cons­tant most peo­ple have over the years on the inter­net, even I still have one of my first email address (a hot­mail account).  I don’t use it gran­ted, but I still have it.  I am not refe­rring to your Inter­net Pro­vi­ders email address (I don’t even know mine from my pro­vi­der), but more your yahoo, hot­mail, gmail, etc.

We use it to fill out forms, sign up for new sites, net­work with new peo­ple that we meet.  For all intents and pur­po­ses, it is our online iden­tity.  With your email address used for so many of your accounts, everything you have put up can now be follo­wed back to you.  In comes Reverse Email Search.

This pro­duct by Spo­keo allows anyone with your email address to punch it in and find anything you have pos­ted on most major sites.  That drunk pic­ture you took and pos­ted on Face­book, the karaoke video of you, any num­ber of emba­rra­sing things you have put up are now searcha­ble with one place.

I have run it on one of my email addres­ses and the results are shown below:

I know this address has only been used to post blog entries so the no results is what I expec­ted.  Not only can someone see pic­tu­res you have pos­ted for free, but for a small fee, they can find out alot more information.

Do your­self a favor, run the free scan on your­self, see what is out there.  If you don’t, someone might.

Disposable Email Addresses

In this auto­ma­ted world known as the Inter­net, it gets to the point where you put­ting your email address everywhere to get infor­ma­tion, have your say, login to sites, post to forums, etc.  With your email addres­ses expo­sed that often, you will notice that your spam count inc­rea­ses and never seems to go away.  Even Mic­ro­soft says that around 97% of all email is spam.  But we just have to login or get that infor­ma­tion.  What should you do?

Dis­po­sa­ble email.  What is that you may ask?  Exaclty what the name says.  Throw away addres­ses.  These are addres­ses you put in to setup a web account somewhere, get the con­fir­ma­tion email, and then go about your day.  No harm no foul.

Are these easy to use?  In a word yes.  There are many out there, but I will look at 4 of these: Mai­li­na­tor, Gue­rri­lla Mail, Spam­gour­met, and Snea­ke­mail.  As always these are always free to use.

Mai­li­na­tor:

The first thing that comes to mind when you open the page is how busy the page looks, and there is nowhere to login.  The only area to enter any infor­ma­tion is Check your inbox.  Wow.  What is my mail­box?  After going through the FAQ it is easy to figure out.  Your mail­box is wha­te­ver you put in that field.  What about a pass­word you are now won­de­ring? None requi­red.  Now I know you want to know about how secure this is, it’s not.  Do not have any con­fi­den­tial emails sent here.  So how does it work then?  When you are filling the form, you will pick wha­te­ver email address you want “insertemailaddresshere”@ on of the follo­wing domains: mailinator2.com, sogetthis.com, mailin8r.com, mailinator.net,spamherelots.com, or thisisnotmyrealemail.com.  After filling the form you go back to mai­li­na­tor and put in the inbox you chose “inser­te­mai­lad­dresshere” and hit go.  All email will be dele­ted in a few hours, so you will need to go and con­firm shortly.

Gue­rri­lla­mail:

Now I have moved on to Gue­rri­lla­mail and am struck by the con­trast bet­ween Mai­li­na­tor and Gue­rri­lla­mail.  Where as Mai­li­na­tor is very clut­te­red, Gue­rri­lla­mail is sparse.  You are given the option of gene­ra­ting a ran­dom name or input­ting your own.  Again there is no pass­word, so if someone knows it, they can see the traf­fic.  After you have pic­ked your name, you are taken to a second page which actually shows any pen­ding email with a count­down time until the account expi­res.  There is the option to extend for another hour if nee­ded.  I do like that it has an rss feed of your email so you don’t have to sit there and con­ti­nuously hit reload to check for more email.

Spam Gour­met:

At Spam Gour­met you actually have to do more then just pick a name.  You do create an account with this ser­vice, inc­lu­ding con­fir­ming your current email address.  This is done because Spam Gour­met is a mail for­war­der.  What do I mean by that?  Well, you will create dis­po­sa­ble email addres­ses to give out, and when the email comes in, it will be for­war­ded to your current email address.  How is the pro­tec­ting you from spam?  When you are on a site and nee­ding to enter an email address, you will put in what…@spamgourmet.com.  We will break this down.  wha­te­ver­you­want — is pretty self expla­na­tory, x — how many emails you want to receive before the address self dis­tructs, user — your Spam Gour­met use­rid.  You can even use this for­mula webs…@spamgourmet.com.  This will help you deter­mine what site the email is coming from.  That account is good for three emails.

Sneak Email:

Lastly we get to Sneak Email.  Like Spam Gour­met, Sneak Email is an account based for­war­ding site.  This site even inc­lu­des a book­mar­klet that will allow you to open and gene­rate a new email address while visi­ting the site.  Once you do create you account and login, it does pro­vide you with a lot of options, fol­ders to send mes­sa­ges to, labels, rules.  With all of these set­tings (the help links do truly explain what each option does) you can chose if you want the mail to bounce back not reacha­ble or so on.  What the ser­vice does that others do not is they allow you to con­ti­nue to use this email address until you choose not to any­more.  So if you do sign up for a web­site or email list or what have you, you can con­ti­nue to use this email address until you decide you are done with it.

I hope this infor­ma­tion is help­ful to you all.  If you know of others, or have expe­rience with these.  Please let me know.

OpenDNS — Review and Recommendation

For those of you that have chil­dren and want to block out spe­ci­fic types of sites, OpenDNS is for you.

It is a free ser­vice that per­forms look up of web­site address, not to be con­fu­sed with email addres­ses. Since it runs so many inqui­ries, it builds up a very large cache cut­ting down on the amount of time it takes to find addres­ses you have not visi­ted in the past.

Not only does it speed up your sur­fing of the web, it has a great con­tent fil­te­ring por­tion. You can block by gene­ral groups: Adult, Social Net­wor­king, Hate, Guns, Sports, Shop­ping, as many as you wish.

If one of the your favo­rite sites does get bloc­ked, you can go in and make an excep­tion that will allow this site to be viewed.

They have great ins­truc­tions that walk you through set­ting up the ser­vice on your net­work, so that all of your com­pu­ters get these set­tings, or on each indi­vi­dual com­pu­ters so that you can lock down a child’s indi­vi­dual com­pu­ter while yours are wide open.

If you do run into pro­blems set­ting these up, I will be more then happy to assist with this.

You can find out more at http://www.opendns.com.

- Diego