April 24, 2002

9:21 AM

The current issue of PC Magazine includes a very big puff piece on Internet mail praising the virtues of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Their review of e-mail clients is relatively uninteresting except for the sidebar on Disposable E-mail Addresses (DEAs). This is basically the old pseudoanonymous remailer under a different name. Among the free services sneakemail is the most basic but spamgourmet has the coolest attitude and allows you to make new addresses on the fly.

Q. How does spamgourmet stop spam?
A. Simple. We delete all of our users' email.

For commercial services there is also spamex and mailshell.
posted by KirkJobSluder (5 comments total)

Great resources, thanks!
posted by aaronshaf at 10:06 AM on April 24, 2002

I want to add an endorsement for spamex. Those folks seem clueful and want to do the right thing. Plus, they were a sponsor of last year's Spamcon convention.
posted by chipr at 12:53 PM on April 24, 2002

I use Spam Motel. It's similar to spamgourmet in that it gives you as many addresses as you want, which are simple forwarders to your "real" email address. It's different from spamgourmet in that each address remains active indefinitely, until you manually go in and deactivate it (as opposed to spamgourmet, where you must specify a maximum number of messages to allow through via any given address, after which the address is deactivated).

I prefer the manual-deactivation-only method of Spam Motel, just because the majority of companies are responsible and don't spam me. I've created about 50 addresses via Spam Motel, and have only had to deactivate 1 or 2 which were later used for spam.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:35 PM on April 24, 2002

I use the MailBlox feature in Orangatango's VirtualBrowser service... I can generate new DEAs easily when I'm away from the web, and it generates them automatically while I'm surfing. Very nice... and each DEA is programmable to expire on a date, after certain number of uses, or to stay alive indefinitely.
posted by silusGROK at 1:52 PM on April 24, 2002

personally I don't get much spam, except for HotMail... but I do enjoy receiving a portion of referral and advertisement revenue from zWallet.com, which offers web-based e-mail accounts even better than free - they pay you!

sign up at zWallet.com, and please use 'geekier7' as the referrer
posted by gkr at 6:54 PM on April 24, 2002