Spamgourmet
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Spamgourmet is a free e-mail service maintained "by folks who've been driven rabid by spam since 1993 or so."
Its approach to fighting spam is simple. First, one registers an account with Spamgourmet with a unique username. One provides his or her real email address that must be confirmed. Once the account has been set up, one may publicly (e.g. on Usenet) or privately (e.g. to someone you don't trust to keep your address private) provide email addresses in the form
- someword.number.username@spamgourmet.com
Where someword is any word you can make up on the spot, number is any number between 1 and 20, and username is your spamgourmet username. After giving out made-up Spamgourmet email addresses, Spamgourmet automatically forwards to user's real email address the number of emails sent to that address up to number in the Spamgourmet address. Any further emails after that number are simply discarded by Spamgourmet. Spamgourmet claims to have "eaten" (i.e., discarded) over 70 Million spams as of March 2005.
Spamgourmet has two modes: no-brainer and advanced. No-brainer mode works as described above. Advanced mode has additional free features described below.
"Trusted Senders" allows Spamgourmet users to identify sender email addresses Spamgourmet should continue forwarding past the "number" stated in the Spamgourmet address.
"Reply Address Masking" hides the real address of Spamgourmet users replying to email messages sent through Spamgourmet. With Reply Address Masking" turned on, when Spamgourmet users reply to an email forwarded by Spamgourmet, the reply goes back to Spamgourmet. Spamgourmet puts on the users original Spamgourmet address on the reply before forwarding the message on to the sender. If "Reply Address Masking" is off, the reply goes straight back to the sender with the Spamgourmet user's real address on the email.
"Watchwords" and "Prefix" requires Spamgourmet users to make up words containing a specific watchword or prefix. This makes guessing an acceptable Spamgourmet address more difficult. Spamgourmet users can also cancel groups of Spamgourmet addresses containing a specific password or prefix.
"Default Number" is a number of email messages Spamgourmet will automatically forward to users if users accidently give out a Spamgourmet address without a number.
External links
- Spamgourmet website (http://www.spamgourmet.com)
Related Services
- myTrashMail (http://www.mytrashmail.com)
- Mailinator (http://www.mailinator.com)