Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

Michael Dunn_ — Fri, 19 May 2006 21:09:57 GMT

Who actually puts their _real_ info into signups anymore? Or, looking at it from the other side, why do sites collect such info anymore, knowing that most of the info they get is utter crap and worthless?

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

Peter Torr - MSFT — Thu, 18 May 2006 19:15:00 GMT

Hotmail is where you *get* an address. You need to provide a username / password to keep your e-mail confidential.

They might ask for other info (I don't recall right now what they ask for), but at least with e-mail you get on-going benefits; it's not a one-shot deal.

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

tony roth — Thu, 18 May 2006 19:08:40 GMT

sounds like hotmail.com

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

Jason Coyne — Thu, 18 May 2006 16:35:11 GMT

Two solutions for you.

1) get your friends to use smugmug or flickr. They dont do naughty things like that.

2) Use sneakemail. Its not "throw away" like mailinator, and its not open, like bugmenot, but you can create a new email address for every website, that gets redirected back to your real address. You can filter inside sneakemail, to get rid of spammers (say amazon sells your addy - you still want email from amazon, but not anyone else) or turn off the whole address at will. I am very promiscuous with email, and I get almost no spam (except for the "try every possible address" spam), sneakemail took care of it all.

Of course, that only works on a "virgin" address, if you are already compromized, no soup for you!

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

Chris Moorhouse — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:14:37 GMT

Interesting.

1. To begin with, I don't know what _anything_ is going to cost me. Sure, it's just a dollar now, but when I think about the number of times I got the shaft because I needed just one more dollar handy, I get a little choked. I don't know what being away from the phone might cost me, nor what hanging around it might cost either. Which brings up the other thing, what's the cost of _not_ signing up? Whatever's on the website might seem trivial now, but I can attribute most of my life's events directly to a childhood belief that pigs were cooler than sheep (is that trivial enough to create an example?), so sometimes I'm not so sure about exactly what constitutes a "trivial benefit".

2. I bought a house, so my name, my wife's name, and my home address are now a matter of public record. The email address with which I sign up for things circulates a lot, and would be easy to snatch if anyone cared. My home phone number might be a little more difficult to come by, but I kind of doubt it. On the whole, there are probably cheaper and easier ways come by the information these sites are requesting than putting up a website that provides a service that I want to use.

The big barrier to me is the time spent signing up. It's just so flippin' annoying! By the time I've figured out where my unit number goes on any given form, I'm usually so bored and irritated that I give up. This tends to cost me a lot in terms of 1(b) above.

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

Peter Torr - MSFT — Thu, 18 May 2006 07:41:40 GMT

The trouble is that sometimes the ToS that you "agree to" says that you won't use a fake address (or, more likely, that you will "keep it secret" or something like that...) so things like BugMeNot are probably against the rules :-/

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

Dean Harding — Thu, 18 May 2006 07:29:41 GMT

Hear, hear!

If someone sends me a link to a photo site, and if I feel like I REALLY want to look at the pictures, I'll sign up with a throwaway email address (the cool thing about having your own domain is you can make up throwaway email addresses really easily) and fake everything else. Then, once I've finished looking at the photos, I'll delete that email address and never use it again.

I don't understand why they want you to sign up just to LOOK at photos anyway. I can do it for free without a computer, why would I want to go to actual TROUBLE to do it on a computer?

re: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Spams?

Me — Thu, 18 May 2006 07:24:47 GMT

So put in false information.

Other workarounds are mailinator.com and bugmenot.com.