Hotmail Launches Accounts You Can Throw Away

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Today, Hotmail is getting a new feature aimed at 'e-mail enthusiasts,' which lets anyone create multiple e-mail accounts that can be read, replied to, and managed from their everyday e-mail inbox. These additional e-mail addresses can be had in the same manner as signing up for new accounts, but they require no extra log-ins or upkeep. ... The idea is to give users a safe way to provide third parties with an e-mail address, without giving up the address they've provided to family and friends, which, if compromised, can end the usefulness of that particular account. Each user will be able to create up to five aliases, any of which can be deleted and replaced with another at any time. Over time, Microsoft will increase that limit to 15 aliases per account, making it so that the true heavy users won't need to juggle between two or more Hotmail accounts."

Cool idea

[trollertron3000]

I've used it elsewhere but integrated into a client like hotmail is a good idea. Besides, I already use hotmail for my spam address. Now Google, steal this please.

Own domain

[Dan East]

I've been doing a similar thing with my own domain / webserver for the last decade. I'll make up email addresses right on the spot, usually like "[e-mail]" or "[e-mail]", etc. I have a catch all account that receives all emails to non-existent accounts, and I can split any of the addresses off into an actual account whenever needed (or disable it if it becomes inundated with spam). That was always one of the big perks of owning your own domain.

Beaten to it?

[Firehed]

This seems pretty similar to Gmail's aliasing - append anything after a plus sign to your email address (ex [e-mail]) and it goes to your main inbox. If that address is compromised, just filter anything addressed to that account.

Microsoft seems to have a few advantages here, though. First, it's a lot more seamless. Second, there are tons of websites that incorrectly validate email addresses and treat + as an illegal character, which it is not (hell, you can go directly to an IP address instead of a domain, although nobody ever would), so by extension it's harder to use as a throw-away address. And third, it's pretty obvious you've done it, and websites can just s/\+[A-z0-9.-][e-mail]/@gmail.com/g it into oblivion.

Of course, in order to get this functionality, you need to use hotmail. Aren't those already throw-away accounts by definition?

Re:Great Idea.

[hawguy]

Gmail has something that's arguably better -- you can use a plus sign to append any string you like to your address, so you can have "[e-mail]' as your main account and give "[e-mail]" to your family. And when you sign up for a Hormel mailling list, you can use "[e-mail]" so you know when you're getting spammed by Hormel.

Re:Cool idea

[Patoski]

While not exactly an implementation of a throwaway address, you can use plus sign addressing (subaddressing, i.e. [e-mail]) with Google. I use it for every site I sign up on so I can see who gives out my email address so I can filter everything from that alias into the trash.

Additionally you can also place a period anywhere in the user portion of your email address and gmail will route it to your address.

For instance, if your email address is "[e-mail]", you can also give out "[e-mail]", "[e-mail]", etc. and all of them will route to your original address.

Re:Cool idea

[Graff]

And as soon as I see your email in this format, I strip away the "+" part and have your original address which I can merrily spam.

Spam away on it, the original, no "+" address is to a spam mailbox.

Only addresses with the "+" part go to actual mailboxes that I read. I never hand out the bare address to anyone.

Re:Own domain

[SydShamino]

Yup, I do exactly this for about the same length of time. The only difficulty is when I have to give an address to someone verbally, and they think I'm giving them a fake one since it's [e-mail]. I usually get around this by giving those people [e-mail] or similar. As it happens I've only ever lost one address this way to spam, but it was obvious right away who sold my address.

Re:Here.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a DynDns subdomain (free) for which I registered a Google Labs account (free) and set up Gmail (free). I get up to 50 Gmail accounts @ my DynDns subdomain. Adding or removing them is easy, and with multiple sign-in, switching between them is easy. Plus I can set them to forward messages to my main e-mail address.

Re:I guess...

[catmistake]

Also in Microsoft's court, Exchange has no true equal and Active-Directory still rules, and, by reverse proxy I guess, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is amazing. On the otherhand, their flagship OS is still a rotting, broken piece of shit and a security nightmare, and their rabid fanbois equal mac zealots in the uninformed denial of this. (Sure... any OS can be broken or insecure... it's just infinitely easier with Windows.)