junk-mail posts

Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

OtherInbox: One mailbox to rule your junk mail

by Brad Linder Sep 10th 2008

If you've ever bought anything online you know that there's no such thing as a simple, one-time transaction. Once you give an online retailer your email address there's a good chance you'll continue to get emails letting you know about other items the company would like you to buy, coupons, or sales until the day you die (or opt out of these email messages, whichever comes first). And that's if you're lucky. There's also a chance that your email address will be sold to marketers and you'll start getting messages from dozens of companies you've never done business with at all.

There are a bunch of services that provide you with disposable email addresses that disappear after a few hours or days. You can use these services to create a temporary email address to sign up for a new web service or purchase an item online. But you need to sign up over and over again every time you need an email address. OtherInbox simplifies the process by letting you register for a single account which comes with a virtually unlimited number of email addresses.

Here's how it works. You register for a free account and you're assigned a custom domain like username.otherinbox.com. Any time an email is sent to any address ending with @username.otherinbox.com it will show up in your inbox. Messages will automatically be sorted into folders based on the address they're sent to.

Tags: email, junk-mail, otherinbox, spam, techcrunch50

Filed under: Internet, Security, Blogging, E-mail

reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Make spammers work hard for your email address

by Brad Linder Apr 7th 2008

Looking for a way to post your email address online, but don't relish the idea of spambots picking up your address and sending you email ads for Viagra and anatomical enhancement pills? ReCAPTCHA Mailhide provides a simple tool for obscuring your email address.

All you have to do is enter your email address (and hope that the folks behind Mailhide aren't doing anything nefarious with it), and reCAPTCHA Mailhide will spit out a URL and some HTML code. Both take you to a page where you have to solve a CAPTCHA test like the one shown above to reveal an email address.

You can either provide a hyperlink to the URL, or embed the HTML code in your page. If you go the HTML route, visitors to your website will see a partial email address that looks something like b...@downloadsquad.com. When they click on the "..." a window will pop up asking them to solve the CAPTCHA. In other words, people don't have to leave your web site to get your email address. They just have to be able to decipher hard-to-read text.

[Thanks rossruns!]

Tags: captcha, email, junk-mail, mailhide, recaptcha, spam

Filed under: Internet, Security, Yahoo!

CAPTCHA hacks could lead to a flood of junkmail

by Brad Linder Jan 30th 2008

You know those annoying "please enter the code" requests you see when signing up for online services, leaving blog posts, or otherwise trying to prove that you're human and not a machine? Yeah, it turns out that the machines are getting pretty good at reading them too.

The basic idea behind the CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart is that computers can't read text if its hidden in an image file. But a Russian researcher claims that he received word that there was an automated CAPTCHA detection system floating around in the wild. So he decided to build his own and managed to create a system which he claims has a 35% accuracy rate.

The claim has some credence, since a Yahoo! spokesperson tells TMCnet that the company is aware of attempts to hack the CAPTCHA system and is working on improvements. In the meantime, if this thing catches on there's a chance you'll see a lot more junk mail letting you know about an opportunity to make $1,000,000 or enlarge certain body parts coming from Yahoo! Mail accounts and other free email services. While the CAPTCHA system was originally developed for Yahoo!, it is now widely used by other services and we're going to go out on a limb and say that if Yahoo!'s implementation of CAPTCHA can be hacked, we'll probably be seeing other sites hacked soon as well.

We suppose Yahoo! can always just make their CAPTCHAs harder to read. Or you know, impossible to read.

[via Slashdot]

Tags: captcha, hackers, junk-mail, spam, spambot, yahoo!

Filed under: Internet, E-mail

Junk emails could eat as much as 512 TB every day

by Brad Linder Dec 19th 2007

You know those few thousand junk emails you've got sitting in your spam folder? Odds are they're only eating up a few megabytes on your server (we just deleted 2968 and freed up a whopping 8MB), but what would that mean if you multiplied that number by all the email accounts in the world?

The folks at Pingdom did a rough calculation and determined that spam eat up 512 terabytes of space every single day. The calculation is pretty rough. In a nutshell, they took an estimate that 120 billion spam emails are sent every day, and then multiplied that number by 4.37 kilobytes, or the size of a typical junk email message.

In other words, email service providers are wasting a lot of money on server space for junk messages. Of course, the only reason spammers send their emails is because for every few thousand people that ignore their pleas, a handful of people will click on a link and buy something, fall for a scam, or inadvertently install a virus or trojan on their PC. So for now, the best solution is to use an email service like Gmail that includes an excellent junk mail filter, and never ever look at your spam folder. But it'd be nice if there was a way to just make those emails all go away.

[via CyberNet]

Tags: junk-email, junk-mail, spam

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junk-mail posts

OtherInbox: One mailbox to rule your junk mail

reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Make spammers work hard for your email address

CAPTCHA hacks could lead to a flood of junkmail

Junk emails could eat as much as 512 TB every day

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