MSNBC: "In an August survey, 77 percent said they would rather clean a toilet than sort through the junk e-mail in their inbox."
In the eternal battle against spam, Yahoo! today announced a major new feature for users of its Y! Mail Plus service. Called AddressGuard, it steals a page from what American Express and other credit card companies have offered for over a year now: disposable identifers. The idea is simple: people were scared to transmit their actual credit card number across the internet so AmEx and others created disposable, single-use numbers that could be created on the fly and used in place of the actual number. Now Yahoo! has taken the idea and applied it to e-mail addresses. Rather than give out one's actual address to a questionable e-commerce site or in an online forum, users will be able to create disposable addresses. In a slight twist, these addresses will exist until the user deletes them. While the idea is good, the implementation isn't perfect. All disposable addresses have to have the same prefix that, once-assigned, won't be changeable. What would be really nice is if Yahoo! would support, say, three prefixes for different classes of "disposable" addresses. Consider: 1st class for your bank contact, etc; 2nd class for newletters and 3rd class for near-junk mail.
