EmailDiscussions.com - Emailias is closing

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- - Emailias is closing (http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=60434)

Software vs Service

Quote:

Originally Posted by pmac (Post 512353)

Hi all,

This is Paul MacIntosh, the former owner of Emailias. As you know, Emailias was sold a couple of years ago. I was working with the new owner up until this past February, at which point I was let go from their service.
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Thanks for the loyal members that stuck with the ups and downs during the years I ran it. I really tried to provide a good member experience and support. I enjoyed getting to know many of you. Sorry that changed and that it's now all gone. :-(

Best regards,
--Paul.

My question is - depending on what you sold to them, and the clauses - do you feel like getting in the software business and selling software that allows you to run a 'personal' emailias like server your self? If you sold the company - and the service, you may be able to do that... Not sure how big your server code was...

If you could make it an outlook / exchange plug-in - that would be huge - but I'd bet a lot more work.

thanks for the good years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by aengler (Post 512131)

It's really a pity that Emailias does not exist any more. I just discovered it now, I never saw a warning (but I don't think a warning would have helped much, anyway). I have just paid the annual fee a few weeks ago, but I don't mind about that; I have been using Emailias for years, was always satisfied and found it was well worth its price.

I don't think any of the other services offers anything close to what Emailias offered. There are quite a few services for throwaway addresses. But that is something quite different, Delete Duplicate Files what I mainly appreciated about Emailias is that it offered normal addresses without any special limitations that can be used for long-term contacts (which, for example, the limited addresses of spamgourmet cannot). I used Emailias for most of my contacts, even if I thought that the likelihood that the address would go to spammers was low - usually there is still some risk, and the work involved in giving up a single emailias (that was only given to one person, organization or website) is much smaller than the work involved in getting a new e-mail address altogether because the old one was somehow leaked to spammers.

Even if there was something similar to emailias, I would be quite sceptical whether the service would not soon be discontinued, as well. I looked at some link lists for such services, and they contain quite a few dead links. In the next weeks I will have a lot of work updating my e-mail address on many websites (I just have to hope that I still know the passwords because I will not be able to get them via e-mail any more...) and notify many people. I don't want to go through that again in the future when another service I would choose now was discontinued, as well.

For me personally, the best replacement for emailias is now getting my own personal domain from a provider a that offers the server-side configuration/mailbox application with unlimited mailboxes and forwarding. That comes relatively close to what emailias offered, although it is clearly not as convenient.

I wonder why Emailias closed. Wasn't it profitable? As far as I can tell, it was really the best service of this kind, and I would certaily have been ready to pay a bit more. I think such a service should not be discontinued, at all, it should be possible to find someone who is willing to continue it if the previous owner doesn't want any more, and if it really had to be discontinued, this should have been announced a long time in advance with repeated notifications.

Same Problem With Me Too So Please Reply As Soon As Possible Thank You!!!!1

Spamgourmet is a good alternative

I have been using spamgourmet.com to replace emailias.com. I have been using it now for almost two months. In some regards it is simpler than emailias was. For instance you do not have to create an address prior to using it. You just put a prefix to the front of a spamgourmet base address and you will automatically establish that address, and it will be forwarded to your real address.

These addresses are limited to 20 emails before they are "eaten", but you can change it to a trusted address which doesn't have a limit.

The reply masking works well. It is also very easy to send an email from one of the disposable addresses.

Spamgourmet has multiple domains from which to choose. In fact more than emailias had.

Just saw about trashmail.net. It has a Firefox extension and looks promising. The Plus version is $14.99 a year. As far as I can, the one drawback is it doesn't allow forwarding to multiple real email addresses.

Quote:

Originally Posted by norbl (Post 515045)

Just read their forum and trashmail.net does allow for multiple real addresses. I think I'll join for a year.

Not convinced about Spamex

I really miss Emailias. Nothing comes near to their (Paul's) level of trust and service. Reading throught this topic, I got hope that Spamex might be the next best thing, but... here some things that (always) put me off:

The Spamex site doesn't provide information about accepted payment methods.
The site doesn't mention if and how subscribers are warned in case their subscription period comes to end.

Spamex and it's little sister SpamCon seem to be brandnames of ClicVU, Inc. which is referred to as the "Company" in Spamex' Acceptable Use Policy. The site says also somewhere else:

Quote:

"SpamCon Foundation DEAs are available through an agreement with ClicVU, Inc. (http://www.clicvu.com), using the ClicVU Disposable Email Address Service(tm). The agreement allows SpamCon Foundation to offer a "Private-Label" version of the service to its users."

But the site http://www.clicvu.com redirects to http://www.spamex.com!

The last news item (review) dates from 2003.
I couldn't find any screenshots on their site
No users forum.

For me enough reason not to embark on this adventure. I think I prefer going cold turkey for now and use a new hotmail account with something less pretentious like Trashmail. And keeping track myself with Excel sheets. That said, I'm still open to good suggestions...

1) Payment methods are under My Account, ---> Profile---> Service Level. This is too hidden for sure.

2)That has been a problem. They stopped disabling accounts due to a software glitch where paid subscribers were blocked.

The user forum does not exist anymore.

With all that said, Spamex provides usable DEA's that allow you to get email for a long time and then if it gets spammed, you can shut it off or delete it. They also have a blacklist feature to screen out spammers one by one, which I should have used to keep my cooler addresses alive, instead of deactivating them.

Other services like spamgourmet provide addresses which are too darn temporary and moreover, often are not ACCEPTED by the places you want to use them. Spamgourmet, trashmail, etc sound like fake spam-eating addresses and people on the web know this.

Say you download trial shareware and they want your address. You give them spamgourmet and they don't accept it. Now you have to use a real address.

Or say I sign up for a strange forum and use a spam chomping address. I go back months later, and I've forgotten my password. They will send it to me, but the address is gone. Oops.

Recent hacking of a major email service Epsilon has put my real email out there, anyway. You just don't think sites like Tivo.com will misuse your info. Another major retail site also lost my real address through the same breach.

Spamassassin running on my mail server and I are becoming good friends.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elmore310 (Post 521975)

1) Spamex provides usable DEA's that allow you to get email for a long time and then if it gets spammed, you can shut it off or delete it.

Clearly that doesn't apply anymore. Spamex ceased to breathe quite some time ago, and has been walking the path of the undead ever since. But finally, someone or somewhat drove a stake thru it's heart, making an end to it.

In my opinion, the Emailias of under former owner Paul MacIntosh, was and will remain the only honest and trustworthy service ever provided.

I think it is not unreasonable to expect that all other services will cease, sooner or later, and more likely under suspicious circumstances than not. One must consider what those people might do with your personal information (even 'secure' details) residing on those servers, when they pull the plug. Correct answer: you will never know!

So I've made up my mind. I will never ever use a service like Spamex, Trashmail and the likes, simply because I lost faith in the people behind them. I rather put up with the spamfilter in hotmail etc, than gambling with my personal details. Paranoid inclined people might even start to think that the spammers made those services, not only to collect data, but also to discourage the future use of such services... theme from Twilight Zone... :-)

Been following this thread for a while now and never really had anything to add before.

I've used a number of services (including Emailias and SpamGourmet) to protect my privacy and inhibit spam. The one I've been using lately is called Bulc Club (www.bulc.club). It's entirely free, has unlimited forwarders, and uses Member Rating for mail filtering -- which operates kinda like Facebook's "Like" button, but blocks messages and increases the spam score instead.

I haven't really explored much of the advanced features since I never really log-in. I think you can block emails individually by sender address, and also block whole mailserver domains. They have plugins for Chrome and Firefox and allow you to create disposable, single-use emails too, but I haven't used those.

Hope this helps someone.

That's sad. They were one of the good email providers. I wonder if Yahoo is going to break off into something else now that it's totally screwed.