Tuesday, October 10, 2006

dodgeit.com: Beat 'em in their own game

Having an e-mail account is common these days. In fact, most people have more than one. So, there is a tendency among web sites to ask for your e-mail in order to track you down somehow or keep statistics of their own. For example, wanna download sth? give us your e-mail! This doesn't seem so bad at first but wait a minute! Giving away your address lets them know where they can reach you. And unfortunately a great deal of them takes advantage of that. For starters they decide to subscribe you to their mailing list, sending your their daily or weekly newsletter. Others sell your address to marketing firms which in turn use it to promote their customers' products.

In the end you end up with a dozen or so e-mails a day in your Inbox that you don't care and never asked for. What can you do?


Well, there yet another solution to this: dodgeit.com

Next time you are asked for your e-mail, give a random blabla37@dodgeit.com. No registration required! After that, visit dodgeit.com and check your e-mail (still without any registration or password). Pretty cool, huh?

Another interesting aspect of this: can you think of common usernames other people would use? Like nobody@dodgeit.com or person@dodgeit.com, etc? Try entering some of them in the site and you'll get a list of the e-mails these people got. So next time you register to a forum or sth, use a hotmail/gmail/yahoo account instead!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Forget about it. Dodgeit.com is history!

--Perfesser_Bear

George 2K8 said...

It was a really useful service. I wonder why it's off.

Anyhow, I'm sure a couple more successors will rise since the "problem" still remains.

Anonymous said...

Its dead because too many people know about it, ffs.

I wish people would just learn to shut up when they find something good. Anyone who dont know about it is tough shit. They will have to learn to find things for themselves.