Privacy :: Can Someone Find My Name

[surferdude]

Hi

I was wondering if someone can find my account information from the spamgourmet email address I provide. In other words, if I provide someone an email address, phrase.dummyaccount@spamgourmet.com, is there any way for them to trace that account to my real name?

Thanks

[SysKoll]

If they are the FBI or the NSA, probably yes, and please don't do something stupid with your address so we don't get one of the 30,000 order letters that the FBI gives every year to web sites and ISPs to obtain information about their subscribers and users.

Otherwise, even a court order would force us to reveal only your protected email address, which is a far cry from your name.

Mere mortals cannot begin to fathom who hides behind a disposable address.

But again, don't expect anonymity and impunity if you piss off The Law.

[surferdude]

I'm not doing anything illegal. I just want anonymity in this particular instance.

Thanks for you reply!

[josh]

On boingboing, there's a story ( http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/18/mi ... wn_pe.html ) about someone using a throw-away email address for Miller Brewing who, months later, received a message from them on the person's real address!! (This wasn't a spamgourmet address afaict, btw) -- the story is very short on details, but some folks have speculated that Miller bought data from companies that collect vast amounts of information and correlate it -- "e-pending" - to associate email addresses to names.

In the story, Miller had taken the action because they weren't able to reach the person on the supplied (junk) email address. This takes us back to the bounce-versus-eat debate. I'm still voting for eat!

[surferdude]

Thanks for the info.

Does anyone know of any other throw-away email servers similar to Spam Gourmet?

[josh]

I don't know of any that are exactly like spamgourmet. I think it's the best (bias alert...)

There's http://sneakemail.com which has addresses that don't automatically expire -- they've been around for a few months longer than we have

A couple with date-expiring addresses are http://jetable.org and http://mailexpire.com (mailexpire was around ages ago, but then went away and came back).

More recently there are the "mail drop" types, that require no signup at all, but you have to go to their websites to read the messages, like http://mailinator.com and http://dodgeit.com

Disclaimer -- it's probably unfair to sum up those services the way I just did -- they likely all have additional features worth checking out. People often sum up spamgourmet in a sentence or two -- it's irritating and often misleading, but I suppose they have to do it.

There are certainly others -- some commercial. Do a web search and you'll see.

If you want truly anonymous email, search for "anonymous remailer" -- I don't know much about those, or even if they're still around.