Kantor on One-time Emails 2

One-Time-Use E-Mail Addresses – You sign up with a address company (e.g., “NoSpam.com”) that you give your real address to. When you need to provide a valid e-mail address on a site, you click a button and NoSpam would instantly generate an address — maybe “x43gti@akantor.nospam.com.” Ugly? Yeah. But who cares? You could specify how long you wanted it to last — ten minutes (for one of those sites that sends a confirmation message), two weeks (for online shopping; it would last till your goods were delivered), or longer. [ “(extlink)Kantor.com”:http://www.kantor.com/blog ]

It seems to me that one-time email addresses are an excessively brute-force solution to spam. With filters, white-lists, and other “behind the scenes” techniques rapidly becoming better, I think the economics of SPAM are going to be reversed, as spammers have to send more and more messages to have enough to get through to get their “1 in 1 million” person who responds to an offer for cheap Viagra.

While many of us (particularly with our own domain names) have used throwaway addresses, I find since I’ve started using “(extlink)Apple’s Mail.app”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/ and really trained their filters that my SPAM volume has gone from a ridiculous several hundred down to 1-2 per day, a level at which the cost of managing all the throwaway addresses would be higher than the cost of deleting the few remaining SPAMs.

Perhaps anonymous commentators and whistle-blowers would use such a service? Even then though, I think what many of those users would want is a COMPLETELY anonymous service, with no way to be tracked back to themselves, and most of them seem content to use a free hotmail or other account.