If Bob starts going overboard on emailing [email protected] that doesn't mean I don't still want to see all that crap. Maybe I really care about what Bob has to say.
Or maybe he's selling email address to sweepstakes companies, Nigerian princes, investment opportunities, fake legal notices, and so forth.
It's nice of Google to try to decide these things and help me classify my mail. But ultimately providing email aliases is an important step.
They have all of the comment functionality in place ([email protected] goes to [email protected] with the label comment) and now just need to be able to give me an alias for "me+comment" so that I can give that out instead of my valuable string "me", which I don't want to give spammers.
It's not really rocket science. They're 99.99% of the way there.
I hope sooner or later some luminary will take that final 0.01% and let me stop using mailinator for registrations that I expect have a high chance of spamming me in the future. :)
I'd like to be able to trust Bob's Spam Emporium first, have it really go to my inbox, and only redirect squirehamboard (i.e. [email protected]) if I ever read an email that I shouldn't have gotten to it. (Since it'll be labelled bobspam it'll be easy for me to decide if I want to nuke it all or just redirect it.)
Gmail's spam filtering is pretty good. Ultimately, part of what makes it good though is that I don't give my gmail address out to spammy sites at all.
I bet I'd get a lot more spam if I didn't use mailinator as well...
I use a specific Gmail address for sign-ups. Sometimes I use the plus sign as a tag, but if someone chops it off, I don't really care. It's just a piece of disinformation that might let me know who leaked an email address.
I don't know how much spam my mailinator accounts get, since I don't check them. But let's check [email protected] since I bet someone has picked that name. In the past hour this is the spam it got:
http://imgur.com/PS7O3Ov
That's 9 pieces of spam in 2 hours. You think Dr Dave, who personally addresses someone who signed up somewhere as (throwaway) in his subject line, is above applying a regex? Do you think the person who sent out "1 Sl!tty Friend Alert" is above applying that regex? You think that Kaylyn, who sent out "Two cute ebony teens in threesome" is above applying that regex?
That's nice. That's the definition of security by obscurity. Literally the definition. So, yes, I'm serious.