Tossing Disposable Addresses

Posted: April 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Email | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Years ago, I signed up for Yahoo Plus (or whatever that service was called), and I am still paying for it. This service allowed me, among other things, to create disposable addresses using a base-hyphen-identifier naming system. Since that time, I have also set up a secondary Gmail account and have used their base-plus-indentifier naming system.

Yahoo’s was an early system. I had to go into their admin panel and set up each unique junk email before the account would accept it. Google’s is much more user friendly on that account, accepting any email with the correct base. On the other hand, many websites prohibit the plus sign in emails, so the Gmail disposable feature is useless on about 30% of sites I have tried. This has led me to keeping the Yahoo account and paying a nominal fee annually. That and just the sheer work of moving emails from accounts over to another system.

Recently, however, I have run into a situation several times that makes me rethink my whole strategy of using disposable addresses. While it is useful to have that unique identifier to block when it gets too much spam, this is not really an issue anymore. Both Gmail and Yahoo mail do a pretty good job of spam detection, and it is easy enough to mark as spam a particular sender whose unsubscribe does not work. However, having signed up for a service under one disposable name and then having to access it or send from that particular email can be problematic. I got snarled up with a magazine subscription and Zinio not talking to each other. I think this is a flaw on Zinio’s part not being able to accept subscriptions to an account that come from other email addresses, but they and many other services have this issue. In addition, I was unable to send from my disposable account from my iPad because I could not add the “+identifier” easily to the email sender address. This caused problems.

I will probably move toward just using a generic email address, separate from my personal one, for signups, subscriptions, and the such. The unique identifier may be a relic from the past and a feature that current apps and sites are not designed to handle well.

Mucking out the Barn

Posted: March 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Email | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

For a number of years I have been very diligent about keeping my work email inbox to a bare minimum. Messages that stay in my inbox serve as reminders of tasks not yet completed or of messages unanswered. I get antsy if by the end of the day there are more than fifteen messages staring at me. I keep my inbox clean by moving completed emails to a subfolder or deleting them.

The same management has not been applied to my personal emails. At this point I still have personal and throw-away emails in Yahoo as well as a set in Google. Both accounts suffer from the never-ending effluent from mail lists. Some I have signed up for long ago, some hid their lists in some signup box left checked, and some just found me and started laying down their messages in the layers upon layers of electronic gunk that serves as my inbox.

Today that all changed. I opened the floodgates and washed away the years of accumulated waste. My stables are as clean as Augeas’ without all of that Greek mythology drama.

I think I will unsubscribe from as much as I can to help keep the flow down.