OddThinking

There is a constant tension between the web-site owners who want to harvest your email address for marketing and the web-users who want to access content without the bother.

Arguably, there is a (social) contract where you are purchasing the information on the web-site in return for providing permission to receive marketing emails.

However, as someone who fast-forwards through the adverts when watching recorded television, you can guess where I stand on this.

BugMeNot provides one element of the arms race between the reader and the writer. It encourages people to share registration details.

That’s fine for a read-only service, but what if you want, for example, the wiki site to record your edits under your handle but not email you newsletters?

I propose a new service, EmailMeNot (just a placeholder name).

Register at a new site with your name and password, but instead of your email address use someUniqueGibberishString @ emailmenot.com.

There an automated rule will look for a registration link, and open it automatically. All other email to that address will be discarded.

Security risks include that you are beholden to the emailmenot.com owners not to take over your account whenever they want.

Defeating this system will be trivial to web-masters to do – simply request the password to be re-entered when the link is followed – but it will get you past a lot of registered web-sites now.

Given two major downsides, I can’t see myself ever implementing this, but if someone else wants to…