Why some sites hate disposable addresses?

Published on Apr 28th 2015, 19:58:29 UTC by nk

If you search terms like disposable e-mail, disposable mailboxes or temporary forwardings in your favorite search engine you'll quickly notice there are lots of sites providing these kind of services. However, if you look more closely, you'll also notice there are several sites that don't like these kind of websites. It looks quite logic that we all want a spam free inbox, right? So, why they hate us?

You'll probably have heard that user profiles = money. You might be wondering: "Money for who? Not for me, of course!". This question is very related to the final question of the above paragraph. There are many sites whose profit is based on selling their own users' private data. Or more precisely, their users' profiles.

Hey, but I didn't agree to allow site X to sell my data!. Oh, you very probably did. Do you remember that innocent checkbox requiring your acceptance to X site's privacy policy and general terms? Did you read it? No, huh? Well, that's the place where you allowed site X to trade your data. And pray those conditions didn't allow in turn re-sending your profile to site Y by site X!

Am I so interesting? Depending on who bought your profile, probably yes, very interesting. This is the idea on which it all stands on. Some sites look for concrete user profiles so later they can bombard them with their products/services. If these sites are legal, they will probably include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of their e-mails. But if you were unlucky, you allowed them to trade your data to other sites which in turn may take advantage and send you another juicy amount of UCE (in addition, clicking on a plenty of unsubscribe links is a big tedium). If you want to read an interesting article about this subject I recommend this Alexis Madrigal's post.

Finally, why are we so evil to them? Because with disposable mailboxes and temporary forwardings we break their possibility of selling profiles to third-parties, because at the time they try to reach you the address will probably be expired and they will get a heartbreaking No such user error. We strongly believe that allowing users to have their mailboxes free of phishing, spam, scams, UCE and similar is a right and not a privilege. As you might noticed, there are several sites doing lists of disposable services to try to block registrations with them on their sites. In our opinion, this is quite useless, nowadays domain registration is cheap enough to afford buying dozens of domains per site so they simply can't block them all. That's why from time to time you'll see that we stop using some of the domains you currently see, and you'll also see new ones (by the way, domain donations are very welcome :-).

Ready to get your disposable mailbox or temporary forwarding? Go get them!