• 
• 

 1 of 2

Gallery

A spam-free mailbox!

Posted on 17 Jun 2004 at 14:02

Christmas comes early for Davey Winder as he discovers a clean inbox and how to use AOL without the interface baggage

Mailinator provides the missing link - easily created and totally disposable email addresses that cost nothing and send no spam your way. It really couldn't get any simpler than this: whenever you need to give a valid email address you make one up that can be literally <anything-you-like>@mailinator.com. Then visit www.mailinator.com and enter that mailbox name and you can pick up any mail that's been sent to it. You don't need a password, any software client beyond your web browser, or any subscription. That mailbox will self destruct in just a few hours, and they're in the public domain as long as they live, so avoid obvious names and never use them for a service that might reveal sensitive personal, financial or commercial data. Also, you can't send anything from the mailbox, so it's useless for any service that requires an authenticated reply. All messages to a mailinator address are eventually vaped, so unless you keep a close eye on the mailbox while it's active you might miss something important, which is why some kind soul has produced the Java-powered Nator utility that redirects messages from any given Mailinator address to a specified mailbox at your domain using your own SMTP server (or that of your ISP, naturally). It's free, and it works, and you can grab the latest version from filenabber.com/nator/download. On the downside, don't expect the fun to last forever - content providers will soon get wise to the trick and simply block registration and access to anything from a mailinator.com domain, which will be a shame.

AOL: an ISP is born
Continuing the theme of surprise that runs through my column this month, I now turn my attention to AOL, and to paraphrase Shakespeare, I come to praise AOL, not to bury it. Yep, it's true, I am indeed saying that AOL is 'a good thing'. One of the many reasons that I, and many others, have moaned about AOL in the past is that using it just as a service provider requires you to fire up its resource-hungry front-end and keep that running in the background even though you're not actually using it for anything other than the initial dial-up. This has now, with the release of AOL 9, become a thing of the past: an AOL Dialler can now sit in your system tray and connect you with a single click. It's not a resource hog - it goes away back to the tray once you've connected, and remains pretty invisible throughout your session. Yet you still get the benefits of AOL dial-up, such as the 'dial-in from anywhere' connectivity, the lack of cut-off limits, no CLI-dependent access, auto-reconnects following any line drops and so on. So - and I find this hard to have to cough up and say - well done AOL, and thank you for listening to those of us who have been asking for such real-world functionality for many a long year.

Although the proprietary email system remains - and despite some improvements it's still a pig's ear compared to a long-trousered, real-world client such as Outlook - at least you no longer need ever fire up that AOL GUI again. In fact, to be fair, if you go to keyword:communicator you can download an Outlook Express look-alike client that not only integrates email, IM and the AOL address book but also supports multiple account checking, and that includes non-AOL POP3/IMAP email accounts. Despite my doubts about just how useful it may prove to be in the real world, especially since the AOL 8 implementation was something of a chocolate teapot, the new anti-spam filter based on a combination of Bayesian and community-fed blacklist database approaches actually works remarkably well. A couple of years ago my AOL mailbox - all but unused here - was collecting in the region of 100 spam messages per week. The AOL 8 spam measures reduced this to about 99 per week, that is, it made precious little real impact on the problem. However, during the few months that I've been running the AOL 9 betas and then the release client, my spam count has dropped to a dozen per week maximum.