Friedbeef’s Tech

One of the most basic ways to avoid email spam is to not provide your email to any site or service which you don’t trust. On occasion though, you may want to read a particular article, access a service, or download a program which requires you to signup and provide your email details among other things. While you can fake your other personal details, it often is the case that your email address has to be a working in order for them to send you a confirmation link or key.

Provide your email address openly without qualm, and you could be opening yourself to a world of spam. So what are your options at this point?

1. Use Bugmenot. This is by far the easiest way to go about it as Bugmenot allows you to use other people’s logins which they have willingly shared avoiding the signup phase all together
2. Use a separate email service – I’m a Gmail user so I may use Yahoo Mail as my signup mailbox. Try not to use the same mail service for your signup and personal account eg. Two Yahoo Mail accounts (unless you enjoy logging in and out of separate email accounts continuously).
3. Use a disposable email address – This is much more convenient method than separate email services and is often much faster to load up because it designed to do one thing, and one thing only – read email. No sending, no contacts, no drafts for email. This makes it a purpose-built signup mailbox.

One of my favorite throwaway email services is something called Ipoo. Yes, Ipoo sounds like a declaration that I want to visit to the toilet, but let’s not judge the product by its brand name.

No signup or passwords required

When using ipoo, the process is simple. When you’re at any sign-up site, just make up an email address and end it with “@ipoo.org” (eg. hello@ipoo.org ). You don’t have to sign up for the email account… If it does not exist it will be created automatically when an email directed to the account is received.

To access the mailbox, just go to ipoo and tell it the email address you just made up. There is no signup, or password required. Alternatively you can bookmark the page and access it with one click. Once again, it loads much faster than regular webmail because it is purpose built for reading email only.

Bear in mind this is a public email account accessible by anyone who wants to use the same address as you. (You can have a look at hello@ipoo.org inbox here). It also has a 100 message limit, and all messages have a 7 day lifespan. Which is fine for most cases, as all you really need to do is get in, get your signup password key/link, and forget about the account. (For services which you want to use on an ongoing basis, you should use a private email account not a disposable one).

RSS Ready

Ipoo is also RSS ready which means you can stream any incoming email subject headers directly to your RSS reader, or if you’re using Firefox- directly into your browser which means you don’t even have to access Ipoo to see if the email you were waiting for had arrived.

Bonus Tips:

Ipoo also comes with 3 extra little services, the snippets feature which allows you to create a little snippet of information on the web and share it on the web. Useful for quick notes which you need to share on an ongoing basis eg. directions. Take a look at an example here.

It also shows you your IP address in case you ever need it.

Finally, it allows you to shorten URLs which are long an unwieldly into a much shorter URL so it’s easier to pass around and share it with your friends. I personally prefer the TinyURL Bookmarklet, which I can integrate directly into my browser, but it’s an Ipoo function nonetheless.

Are you using another disposable email service, or do you have other ways of avoiding spam by signup?

Related Links:

Ipoo Disposable email
Ipoo Snippets
Ipoo Link Shortener
TinyURL
TinyURL Bookmarklet
Dodgeit Disposable email
Listable – 30 disposable email services

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