Keep your email address private with Contactify
Contactify is designed to make posting your email address on the internet a little less spam friendly by turning your address into a URL. To get your own Contactify URL you simply enter your email address and password, then magically the service turns it into a short URL you can post on your blog or on a message board without fear of winning the Nigerian lottery 10,000 times.Potential contacts are not even given your email address when they click on your Contactify link. Instead, they are taken to a contact form on the site where they can send you a message, and you can keep your email address private.
[Via EmilyChang]
Comments
7
Subscribe to commentsDavidMay 4th 2007 5:14PM
Hmm...from a spam-avoidance standpoint, it seems like 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. I imagine the URLs will be similar, easily recognizable, and therefore easy to find via Google search. So what's to stop someone from writing a bot that trolls google for Contactify URLs, then uses the service to send spam to users? Sure, this will keep your email from getting harvested and traded, but you're still open to unsolicited email. I guess that's the price you pay for wanting to be contactable. Does anyone know of a good "temporary" email address service? I could envision posting an address that forwards all mail to my real address for a period of time set by me, then expiring, limiting my long-term exposure to spam.
Racetrack-OwnerMay 4th 2007 5:24PM
David, a good temporary service I use all the time is spamgourmet.com. After you sign up with a username, it works like this:
word.x.user@spamgourmet.com
"word" is anything you choose, which is nice because you'll see it on the TO line in your inbox, so you know where the sender got the e-mail address from.
"x" is an optional number that limits how many e-mail forwards you'll get before spamgourmet automatically trashes subsequent e-mails.
"user@spamgourmet.com" is the username you chose.
Very easy, you never have to visit the spamgourmet site again after signing up, and I've never had problems after using the service often for five or six years...
DarrenMay 4th 2007 5:32PM
Contactify doesn't work very well. When you enter you code in the email address line of a site - it tells you that it's not a good email address as there is no (@) sign, so you can't put the code in there. It's useless!
Just like on this site - I put my code in the email box and it says E-maill address is not valid!
PeterMay 4th 2007 6:22PM
David, check out http://www.guerrillamail.com/ It's a VERY temporary
email service, 15 min at a shot. Great for those confirmation emails
and such.
SniferMay 4th 2007 8:19PM
... where they can send you a SPAM message?
yusufMay 11th 2007 3:00PM
i never give out my real email address in junk signup site. i'm using http:/www.spaml.com as a disposable email service to get rid of spam.
you can try http://www.spaml.com too
darkoJul 26th 2007 5:11PM
spaml is not very reliable, do you know any other disposable services ?