Years ago I came across Spammotel.com – a useful service that would generate random looking email address’s and then allow you to receive emails sent to those email address’s at your real address. A useful third party system that would allow you to quickly and easily change the destination of where the emails go and also block people who abused the address by deleting the address. In the past I had several email lists that go to my Spammotel and then are redirected to my work email address – when I changed jobs, I only had one location to change my email address and all the emails started coming into the new mail account. (This was before RSS feeds to allow you to go grab the content when convenient as opposed to having it delivered via email).
They have now decided to go pro only and charge $9.99 a year for the service – still not bad, but to be honest, it’s probably better to get a domain of your own and set up catch all email address’s and then dev/null any that get abused. That might sound a bit complicated for some users, but most people reading this blog will know what I’m on about.
Ironically, the email announcement about this change in service when to my Gmail spam folder and my corporate Postini filter.
I’ll be checking the web site to see which of my to see what email lists are active and see if I need to resubscribe to any (the list gives you the number of emails received which is a nice function).