Hotmail launches accounts you can throw away | Hacker News Reader

Hotmail launches accounts you can throw away

news.cnet.com

32 pointssp33224 comments

I was under the impression that Hotmail is accounts you can throw away.

They multiplied it then. Now we have multiple trashbins.

I've been using and publishing my one personal email address for over 10 (15?) years now, and I sign up o a ton of new web sites and notification lists. So far I've never been harassed by spam that I can't get rid of, and it takes me 10 seconds a day to scan through my Google Apps Gmail spam folder to look for false positives.

I just don't see the need personally for throwaway accounts, although I do use a few subaddresss with minuses in them for filtering.

Maybe I'm not a typical user, and I get why people think they need them, but in my actual experience, I've been doing fine without them.

I've had the same experience. I use mailinator occasionally, for sites that seem really untrustworthy, but on the whole I use my real email and am not too bothered with spam.

Hotmail did something!

I created http://boog.me specifically for that purpose, but instead of receiving spam forever, you just forget about that account and never check back.

Like mailinator.com?

They have new aliases all the time to prevent people preventing you from using mailinator email addresses.

but there are cases when I do want to see some emails to flow in for awhile until I really realize that the account is trashed.

A similar throwaway email forwarding service I've been using for a while is spamgourmet: http://spamgourmet.com/

Spamgourmet has two advatanges I can see: one is that it's dead easy to create aliases, the other is that it's small enough that noone has started an automated system to spam spamgourmet users (something that it is vulnerable to.)

Shameless self promotion: there is also my http://tempalias.com which doesn't require you to create an account, or even just visiting the site more than once (there is a bookmarklet).

Also, the full site is open source (node.js), so you can run your own at your own domain

I use Sneakemail: https://sneakemail.com/

It has lots of options and tweaks available.

Shameless plug:I made http://www.pepbot.com it's a temp mail service with the ability to automate the confirmation task that many services require to verify your email.

I use http://www.dispostable.com/ for my throwaway mails.

They should launch accounts they don't throw away.

Anyone else see this as a royal pain in the ass? Malware developers and spammers are going to jump all over this one.

I wouldn't think so - it should be more difficult to interface with a email service like than than to use their own server software.

Can anyone find this info on a Microsoft blog, or feature list, or something? I could only find the info on CNet.

From the Windows Live Blog:

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

It is possible to use different email accounts from one gmail interface as well, which I do.

Yes, but it is painful to set up things like check mail, send mail account, forwarding and filters. Google should add alias too, I hope that what hotmail do will force them to do the same.

What about youraddress+something@gmail.com? It's pretty useful, but still people can know your real address.

won't this make it really easy for spammers to create fake accounts on other sites?

It's still harder than a catch-all alias on a domain hosted elsewhere.

Would be also useful if the government would issue us multiple identities we could throw away.

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