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Posts with tag junk-mail

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

OtherInbox: One mailbox to rule your junk mail

OtherInbox
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.

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

reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Make spammers work hard for your email address

reCAPTCHA Mailhide
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!]

Filed under: Internet, Security, Yahoo!

CAPTCHA hacks could lead to a flood of junkmail

Yahoo! CAPTCHA
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]

Filed under: Internet, E-mail

Junk emails could eat as much as 512 TB every day

Dirty Spam
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]

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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