Disposable email services are a great way of hiding an email account during account signups on the Internet. Many Internet services (and some computer programs as well) require an account before the service can be used. Some of these websites send unwanted emails to the user or sell the data to other companies that will then flood the email inbox with spam. Disposable email addresses are a solution to this problem. Users who want to signup for a service use one of the freely available disposable email address services to do so. All emails that are send from that website (or from spammers that bought the email address) will land in the inbox of the disposable email service. Most services of this kind delete email addresses that have been created regularly to block incoming spam.

Thrashmail.net uses a slightly different system. The service will forward incoming emails to another email address. Many other disposable email address services offer an inbox on their website which removes the requirement of having to hand out another email address.

The life span of the email address and the number of forwards can be specified on the website. The Firefox add-on for the service adds lots of comfort to using it. The add-on can be used to create new Trashmail.net email addresses and to manage previously created email addresses.

The settings are highly configurable and contain all options that are offered on the Trashmail website including a prefix for new email accounts, the lifespan, forwards and to enable a response system that will filter incoming email messages by a captcha system.

A new context menu entry is added by the add-on that can be used to add a new disposable email address to a web form. The manager displays an overview of all email addresses that have been created by the add-on. This is one of the best ways to keep track of previously used disposable email addresses.

The Firefox add-on can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Christopher William Smith or Rizler as he is know to some, is one of the “SPAM kings”. He’s run a successful “online pharmacy” (v|@grA seller) for quite some time and is as almost as notorious as spammers can get. Really successful. He accumulated more than 17 cars and millions in assets before his 28th birthday.

Well, this week, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis has sentenced Chris to 30 years in the slammer. Unfortunately, it’s not really for sending SPAM.

The real reason is, Chris doesn’t have a license to sell prescription drugs in the US but he’s been doing it anyway. $24 million (USD) worth (which does raise the question, who the hell was buying it all?). Chris was ordered to cease selling the drugs online in a previous court case but rather than obey, he simply skipped the country and set up shop south of the border.

To do all this, he used false passports, obtained money from frozen accounts and threatened people’s lives. This includes looking into hiring a hitman to take out his previous database admin, Bernadette Hollis. A truly charming fellow – everything we like to imagine a spammer to be.So that’s one less spammer to worry about but probably no less spam in your inbox tomorrow.

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