Disposable addresses... - Page 3

RLBrooks · 28 Jan 2007, 05:50 AM

I'll add my vote for a disposable address feature. I use Sneakemail a lot, I must have close to a hundred addresses defined and add more all the time. I've used Spamgourmet but I've found them to be very slow and even lose the occasional email. (I've sent myself mail thru them as a test and it never arrived.) I also use E4ward, they work ok but I prefer Sneakemail. I also use Yahoo's AddressGuard. It works well but I care less for Yahoo in general because I don't want to be part of their larger family of functions, I only want email.

I don't 'dispose' of too many of the addresses I create. While most are 1 or 2 time uses I keep the rest as I don't know when I may need them again. Also many sites now identify you via your email address so if I gave them a disposable one to start with I can't get rid of it without updating that account to give them a different address.

Disposables are definately worthwhile. I've had two address that I used to make a web purchase later return to me as phishing attempts.

As to whether the address is randomly generated like Sneakemail or user selected like E4ward or Yahoo, how about allowing both? When a user defines a new disposable offer them a choice? Random ones are good for single use emails but a user selected one would be nice to have for a long term disposable.

You could let Member accounts have 1 or 2 disposables so they can try out the feature; maybe let them buy a block of additional ones, but it should be part of the Full/Enhanced feature list.

Russ

newhampshire · 29 Jan 2007, 02:08 AM

I was hoping someone might explain to me the advantages over using the proposed disposable email address over the FM alias feature currently available.

With FM aliases you can create and delete addresses. It seems the 2 main features of a disposable address are exactly the same thing with one possible addition: delete after elapsed time.

I must be missing something. Can someone fill me in?

RLBrooks · 29 Jan 2007, 02:34 AM

For me the key feature of disposable addresses is you have define that address and won't get email at a similar version of it that you didn't define. The address isn't just to keep related email separated into their own folders, its more important feature is to HIDE your real address from the person you are contacting.

I get a Sneakemail.com address for every web separate web shop/newsletter/form/etc that asks for one. I don't really know these people I am contacting and I don't know how they will, long term, treat me or my email address. If later I am proved correct, that they leaked my email to the bad guys (it's happened to me twice) then I can just delete that disposable address and do business elsewhere.

The problem I see with FM aliases is if the 'bad guys' realize you're using a FM alias then they can keep spamming you with multiple version of your alias. You can't shut it off unless you delete the whole alias which means you'll also destroy all the other addresses you've given out based on that alias.

Disposable addresses need to stand alone so they can be created and destroyed individually.

Russ

ruaricallow · 29 Jan 2007, 03:29 AM

I have used http://www.spamex.com/ for several years, along with a personal domain name (ruari.com). I can generate randomly named usernames at my personal domain or use their own provided domains (spamex.com and xemaps.com). Alternatively I can create usernames of my choosing at any of those three domains. These can work indefinitely or be set to shutdown after a given number messages received or after a given period of time (both are user definable per email address). Against each email address I can store information about the address, e.g. the Site URL associated with a company I may have generated it for, the display name (personality) for outgoing emails, site username, site password, and other related notes. All of this is searchable online via their web interface.

I can also send out email from any of these addresses either via a webmail interface or via an automatically generated (or even user chosen) forwarding addresses associated with a given contact e.g. all email sent from me to jsakiwdeATruari.com will be auto forwarded to contactATexample.com and appear to have come from ksjhdskATruari.com, with the display name associated with ksjhdskATruari.com (the address I gave to example.com).

Another nice feature is the ability to generate a one time use email addresses for anyone else. This is handy should I need to give a contact email address for a friend, e.g. for those 'mail this story to a friend' links on , for use with egreeting cards or some other purpose. I can use this feature to give out a generated forwarding address for my friend without fear.

Also a bookmarklet link is provided to auto lookup the email address you provided for a given domain name (just click on it whilst surfing that domain) or to generate a new address when providing contact details to a new website.

You can associate your account with multiple real email accounts.

There are other features that escape my memory right now but their website has an FAQ and a free trial.

However, all this comes at a price, $10+ a year depending on the number of disposable email addresses you need and size of attachments you need to receive ($10 gets you an initial 500). Also you pay a $50 one time fee to enable the use of your own domain (should you want that).

One thing they are missing is the ability to come up with an address on the fly, without using their website. I get around this by using plus addressing or subdomain addressing. I also have an account at spamgourmet for more advanced such requirements.

Now to get back onto the topic of FM offering such a service, despite using Spamex's very capable service (and my use of spamgourmet and subdomain addressing for areas that it is lacking) I would definitely be in favour of this. I'm sure there would be times when whatever you might offer may be easier/more convenient than using Spamex. Also I like the idea of a backup plan should Spamex ever decide to shut up shop.

I slightly doubtful that you would provide a more comprehensive DEA service than Spamex, in the same way that I am doubtful that my very competent ISP (Zen Internet, UK) will provide an email service close to matching Fastmail (specialists tend to do things better!) but I would love to be proved wrong, even if only to save on the relatively low figure I pay to Spamex each year for my account with them. Competition is always good and I'm already convinced of how capable the FM team are! ;-)

NJSS · 29 Jan 2007, 03:33 AM

I use disposables at my domain; but my suggestion below would apply equally as well to aliases.

My problem is tracking the literally hundreds of aliases which I have used in the last few years.

What I would like is something like an address book listing the aliases I have used, and for whom.

The when wanting to e-mail "Amazon" I would type Amazon in the from field and the disposable address would appear.

If a disposable address became compromised one would simply mark it as such in the "address book", which would automatically reject e-mails to that address.

As an aside a credit card spammer was caught by my disposable address. My credit card was debited with a fictitious purchase, in this case of on-line porn. The payment system e-mailed my disposable address confirming the purchase, I contacted the credit card company telling them this particular e-mailo address should only be associated with {XYZ Limited} and not with On-Line Porn Empire. The scam was traced back to an employee at XYZ Limited, who was selling details of their customers & their credit cards to On-Line Porn Empire - a very satisfactory result,

JasonWard · 29 Jan 2007, 05:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by lane
Yahoo Plus has what I consider a neater feature. You specify a base for the disposable addresses, let's say "mbase". Then you can ask for any address of the form mbase-amazon (at) yahoo.com, mbase-vendor2 (at) yahoo.com, etc. Mail is not accepted at the base address mbase (at) yahoo.com or any combination not predefined. I really like this way of doing it.

It would be really great if you could implement disposable addresses for virtual domains...

This is the implementation I vote for.

RLBrooks · 30 Jan 2007, 12:50 AM

I like Yahoo's method Ok. It also has a small editable note associated with each disposable so you can record a few comments about what the address is for. A negative is they don't have any way to download a list of your disposables and their notes.

After Sneakemail's crash and data loss in November I realized how important it is to be able to save this data yourself. I don't expect FM to ever lose my data but I'd sleep better knowing I have copies of my own address book and lists of my other ids.

Sneakemail has a nice feature; instead of just downloading address lists in various formats they also provide a way to send a human readable list to another id. This is the format I choose and the one that helped me identify which addresses they had lost of mine.

Russ

**Sherry** · 30 Jan 2007, 03:03 AM

Hmm, the suggestions are starting to sound more like Aliases than disposable addresses. In fact, it's sounding like they would be better than the Aliases. If FM let us type in what we want instead of using a generated address then I'd rather they fix the real Aliases and implement those suggestions for subdomain addressing that we've been requesting for a long time.

Sherry

JasonWard · 30 Jan 2007, 03:14 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Sherry
Hmm, the suggestions are starting to sound more like Aliases than disposable addresses. In fact, it's sounding like they would be better than the Aliases. If FM let us type in what we want instead of using a generated address then I'd rather they fix the real Aliases and implement those suggestions for subdomain addressing that we've been requesting for a long time.

I think your correct Sherry, except I would like the mechanistic approach talked about lane, I already use throw away addresses extensive at my own domains, but would love a much better/clearer way to manage these.

And I definatly dont want throw away addresses that automacially expire, that would for the most part make them useless to me.

Jason

robmueller · 31 Jan 2007, 07:26 PM

What's the advantage of the yahoo approach over just completely randomly generated addresses?

The main issue I see is getting the addresses out of FM so they can be used externally, in that respect having some sort of javascript bookmarklet or browser extension that allows you to generate one there and then seems to be the way to go. I think the idea would be something you can drag to your links bar, and click on it, it asks you for a "description", then "calls" FM to generate a new disposable address, and puts it in the clipboard(?) or maybe the forum field currently being focused on the web page(?)

I guess what I'm asking for is more than the form of the disposable addresses, what's the usage scenario people actually use that would make generating them the easiest?

Rob

ruaricallow · 31 Jan 2007, 07:40 PM

Quote:

The main issue I see is getting the addresses out of FM so they can be used externally, in that respect having some sort of javascript bookmarklet or browser extension that allows you to generate one there and then seems to be the way to go. I think the idea would be something you can drag to your links bar, and click on it, it asks you for a "description", then "calls" FM to generate a new disposable address, and puts it in the clipboard(?) or maybe the forum field currently being focused on the web page(?)

I guess what I'm asking for is more than the form of the disposable addresses, what's the usage scenario people actually use that would make generating them the easiest?

Rob

That is pretty much exactly how I use Spamex, so this would be perfect for me. (The Spamex bookmarklet picks up the domain name from the URL field as well so that that is also stored)

One comment. Their copy to the clipboard function only works in IE6 and down. IE7, Firefox, Opera, etc. don't allow Javascript to access the clipboard (security reasons presumabley) but I think your idea of filling in the information into the currently foccussed field would work nicely and probably be an even neater solution.

JRobert · 31 Jan 2007, 09:01 PM

@Rob: I use Spamgourmet and I'm well served by the ability to make up a custom address on the fly, even on the telephone. Whenever I need one, I just make up, e.g., acmewidgets.mysgID@spamgourmet.com. I haven't had any abuse of the madeupname.mysgID@spamgourmet.com sort.

The upside to using SG (or another, external service) is that I can shut off a compromised address and never see mail from it again. The downside, of course, is that my mail has to go through the extra hop. It would be very convenient to have this feature brought to within FM, especially if compromised custom addresses could be rejected by FM's SMTP rather than by my script. Obviously, this kind of rejection would be all-or-nothing; any filtering (selective sorting or forwarding) on mail received to a custom address would be my - and sieve's - responsibility.

-jeff-

JasonWard · 31 Jan 2007, 11:03 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by robmueller
What's the advantage of the yahoo approach over just completely randomly generated addresses?

1) That I can make them up when away from my computer or not loged into Fastmail.

2) That it allows me to use a virtual domain with a catch-all as well as throw away addresses that can be blocked.

Jason

msulloway · 31 Jan 2007, 11:47 PM

I prefer the completely random addresses as in Sneakemail. I do not want any part of the address used over as in Yahoo or E4Ward.

NJSS · 1 Feb 2007, 12:00 AM

Clearly there is an argument for completely random addresses as in Sneakemail as proposed by msulloway.

I, and I am sure, many others would like to use meaningful addresses at "my.domain.com", specified by me.

I hope both forms of address generation could be accommodated?

28 Jan 2007, 05:50 AM	#31
RLBrooks Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Walla Walla, WA USA Posts: 28	Re: Disposable addresses... I'll add my vote for a disposable address feature. I use Sneakemail a lot, I must have close to a hundred addresses defined and add more all the time. I've used Spamgourmet but I've found them to be very slow and even lose the occasional email. (I've sent myself mail thru them as a test and it never arrived.) I also use E4ward, they work ok but I prefer Sneakemail. I also use Yahoo's AddressGuard. It works well but I care less for Yahoo in general because I don't want to be part of their larger family of functions, I only want email. I don't 'dispose' of too many of the addresses I create. While most are 1 or 2 time uses I keep the rest as I don't know when I may need them again. Also many sites now identify you via your email address so if I gave them a disposable one to start with I can't get rid of it without updating that account to give them a different address. Disposables are definately worthwhile. I've had two address that I used to make a web purchase later return to me as phishing attempts. As to whether the address is randomly generated like Sneakemail or user selected like E4ward or Yahoo, how about allowing both? When a user defines a new disposable offer them a choice? Random ones are good for single use emails but a user selected one would be nice to have for a long term disposable. You could let Member accounts have 1 or 2 disposables so they can try out the feature; maybe let them buy a block of additional ones, but it should be part of the Full/Enhanced feature list. Russ

31 Jan 2007, 09:01 PM	#42
JRobert Master of the @ Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: New Hampshire, USA Posts: 1,561	@Rob: I use Spamgourmet and I'm well served by the ability to make up a custom address on the fly, even on the telephone. Whenever I need one, I just make up, e.g., acmewidgets.mysgID@spamgourmet.com. I haven't had any abuse of the madeupname.mysgID@spamgourmet.com sort. The upside to using SG (or another, external service) is that I can shut off a compromised address and never see mail from it again. The downside, of course, is that my mail has to go through the extra hop. It would be very convenient to have this feature brought to within FM, especially if compromised custom addresses could be rejected by FM's SMTP rather than by my script. Obviously, this kind of rejection would be all-or-nothing; any filtering (selective sorting or forwarding) on mail received to a custom address would be my - and sieve's - responsibility. -jeff- Last edited by JRobert : 27 Mar 2007 at 01:34 AM. Reason: Added ()'d comment to clarify last sentence. Why so late? In case this thread guides feature implementation.

29 Jan 2007, 02:08 AM	#32
newhampshire Senior Member Join Date: May 2006 Posts: 121	I was hoping someone might explain to me the advantages over using the proposed disposable email address over the FM alias feature currently available. With FM aliases you can create and delete addresses. It seems the 2 main features of a disposable address are exactly the same thing with one possible addition: delete after elapsed time. I must be missing something. Can someone fill me in?

29 Jan 2007, 02:34 AM	#33
RLBrooks Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Walla Walla, WA USA Posts: 28	For me the key feature of disposable addresses is you have define that address and won't get email at a similar version of it that you didn't define. The address isn't just to keep related email separated into their own folders, its more important feature is to HIDE your real address from the person you are contacting. I get a Sneakemail.com address for every web separate web shop/newsletter/form/etc that asks for one. I don't really know these people I am contacting and I don't know how they will, long term, treat me or my email address. If later I am proved correct, that they leaked my email to the bad guys (it's happened to me twice) then I can just delete that disposable address and do business elsewhere. The problem I see with FM aliases is if the 'bad guys' realize you're using a FM alias then they can keep spamming you with multiple version of your alias. You can't shut it off unless you delete the whole alias which means you'll also destroy all the other addresses you've given out based on that alias. Disposable addresses need to stand alone so they can be created and destroyed individually. Russ

29 Jan 2007, 03:29 AM	#34
ruaricallow Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2007 Posts: 22 Representative of: Opera.com	I have used http://www.spamex.com/ for several years, along with a personal domain name (ruari.com). I can generate randomly named usernames at my personal domain or use their own provided domains (spamex.com and xemaps.com). Alternatively I can create usernames of my choosing at any of those three domains. These can work indefinitely or be set to shutdown after a given number messages received or after a given period of time (both are user definable per email address). Against each email address I can store information about the address, e.g. the Site URL associated with a company I may have generated it for, the display name (personality) for outgoing emails, site username, site password, and other related notes. All of this is searchable online via their web interface. I can also send out email from any of these addresses either via a webmail interface or via an automatically generated (or even user chosen) forwarding addresses associated with a given contact e.g. all email sent from me to jsakiwdeATruari.com will be auto forwarded to contactATexample.com and appear to have come from ksjhdskATruari.com, with the display name associated with ksjhdskATruari.com (the address I gave to example.com). Another nice feature is the ability to generate a one time use email addresses for anyone else. This is handy should I need to give a contact email address for a friend, e.g. for those 'mail this story to a friend' links on , for use with egreeting cards or some other purpose. I can use this feature to give out a generated forwarding address for my friend without fear. Also a bookmarklet link is provided to auto lookup the email address you provided for a given domain name (just click on it whilst surfing that domain) or to generate a new address when providing contact details to a new website. You can associate your account with multiple real email accounts. There are other features that escape my memory right now but their website has an FAQ and a free trial. However, all this comes at a price, $10+ a year depending on the number of disposable email addresses you need and size of attachments you need to receive ($10 gets you an initial 500). Also you pay a $50 one time fee to enable the use of your own domain (should you want that). One thing they are missing is the ability to come up with an address on the fly, without using their website. I get around this by using plus addressing or subdomain addressing. I also have an account at spamgourmet for more advanced such requirements. Now to get back onto the topic of FM offering such a service, despite using Spamex's very capable service (and my use of spamgourmet and subdomain addressing for areas that it is lacking) I would definitely be in favour of this. I'm sure there would be times when whatever you might offer may be easier/more convenient than using Spamex. Also I like the idea of a backup plan should Spamex ever decide to shut up shop. I slightly doubtful that you would provide a more comprehensive DEA service than Spamex, in the same way that I am doubtful that my very competent ISP (Zen Internet, UK) will provide an email service close to matching Fastmail (specialists tend to do things better!) but I would love to be proved wrong, even if only to save on the relatively low figure I pay to Spamex each year for my account with them. Competition is always good and I'm already convinced of how capable the FM team are! ;-)

29 Jan 2007, 03:33 AM	#35
NJSS Master of the @ Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Hampshire, UK Posts: 1,238	I use disposables at my domain; but my suggestion below would apply equally as well to aliases. My problem is tracking the literally hundreds of aliases which I have used in the last few years. What I would like is something like an address book listing the aliases I have used, and for whom. The when wanting to e-mail "Amazon" I would type Amazon in the from field and the disposable address would appear. If a disposable address became compromised one would simply mark it as such in the "address book", which would automatically reject e-mails to that address. As an aside a credit card spammer was caught by my disposable address. My credit card was debited with a fictitious purchase, in this case of on-line porn. The payment system e-mailed my disposable address confirming the purchase, I contacted the credit card company telling them this particular e-mailo address should only be associated with {XYZ Limited} and not with On-Line Porn Empire. The scam was traced back to an employee at XYZ Limited, who was selling details of their customers & their credit cards to On-Line Porn Empire - a very satisfactory result,

30 Jan 2007, 12:50 AM	#37
RLBrooks Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Walla Walla, WA USA Posts: 28	I like Yahoo's method Ok. It also has a small editable note associated with each disposable so you can record a few comments about what the address is for. A negative is they don't have any way to download a list of your disposables and their notes. After Sneakemail's crash and data loss in November I realized how important it is to be able to save this data yourself. I don't expect FM to ever lose my data but I'd sleep better knowing I have copies of my own address book and lists of my other ids. Sneakemail has a nice feature; instead of just downloading address lists in various formats they also provide a way to send a human readable list to another id. This is the format I choose and the one that helped me identify which addresses they had lost of mine. Russ

30 Jan 2007, 03:03 AM	#38
Sherry Moderator Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: USA Posts: 8,687	Hmm, the suggestions are starting to sound more like Aliases than disposable addresses. In fact, it's sounding like they would be better than the Aliases. If FM let us type in what we want instead of using a generated address then I'd rather they fix the real Aliases and implement those suggestions for subdomain addressing that we've been requesting for a long time. Sherry

31 Jan 2007, 07:26 PM	#40
robmueller Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 6,102 Representative of: Fastmail.FM	What's the advantage of the yahoo approach over just completely randomly generated addresses? The main issue I see is getting the addresses out of FM so they can be used externally, in that respect having some sort of javascript bookmarklet or browser extension that allows you to generate one there and then seems to be the way to go. I think the idea would be something you can drag to your links bar, and click on it, it asks you for a "description", then "calls" FM to generate a new disposable address, and puts it in the clipboard(?) or maybe the forum field currently being focused on the web page(?) I guess what I'm asking for is more than the form of the disposable addresses, what's the usage scenario people actually use that would make generating them the easiest? Rob

31 Jan 2007, 11:47 PM	#44
msulloway Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Florida Posts: 154	I prefer the completely random addresses as in Sneakemail. I do not want any part of the address used over as in Yahoo or E4Ward.

1 Feb 2007, 12:00 AM	#45
NJSS Master of the @ Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Hampshire, UK Posts: 1,238	Clearly there is an argument for completely random addresses as in Sneakemail as proposed by msulloway. I, and I am sure, many others would like to use meaningful addresses at "my.domain.com", specified by me. I hope both forms of address generation could be accommodated?