escaping from email?

[Fen Labalme]

Running your email through an obfuscation service can help.  If you're really
paranoid, the path to the obfuscated mail service could be onion routed, as
through Tor.  Several of these exist, I believe, and 2idi plans to provide the
capability "real soon now".  Such a service will enable you to easily:

* generate a new email for every service that requires one
* thus, you can track who gives your email address away
* and you can shut that address down should it ever become problematic
* ...adding a negative point to that services community reputation
* knowing this, services may choose to "play nice" to keep your business

=Fen


Kevin Turner wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 00:29 -0600, Jay Knight wrote:
>> One great thing about distributed authentication is that I can identify 
>> myself on a site without providing my email address.
> 
> This is not necessarily a given.  I mean, yes, it's true that you don't
> need an email address to *identify* yourself the way a lot of e-commerce
> sites currently do it ("please enter your email address to log in"), but
> there are still plenty of reasons why a site might want to require you
> to associate your email address with your account, including
> 
> * giving you a path to recover your log-in credentials in case you lose
> them.  (Your ID server went out of business or you forgot which ID you
> used but remember your email.)
> 
> * making it more expensive to write spambots.  (A bot that logs in *and*
> responds to an e-mail confirmation is more expensive to build and
> maintain than a bot that just logs in to a web form.)
> 
> * providing functionality that's part of the service, as Zooomr does.
> 
> * having a channel through which to notify you about important changes
> in terms of service, changes to your account, etc.
> 
> * sending you spam or selling your contact information to marketers.
> 
> Not all of those are good reasons, but some of them are.  I don't think
> we should expect to see services stop using our email addresses anytime
> soon.
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
http://public.xdi.org/=Fen.Labalme