Pet peeve

[hedgee]

What's with sites that ask people to type in their email address twice? It's not like a password field, where presumably you're typing something you can't see, and it's not like people will enter it twice manually…sane people will type it once and cut/paste the second time.

(Of course, if I designed sites for myself, there would also only be one

Comments

[tenbaset]

And even then, why do they want my email address anyway? If they're lucky, they'll get a sneakemail one which will be deactivated at the first piece of marketing. More typically, they'll get one that doesn't work; or is postmaster@their.own.domain, or possibly one at mailinator.com.

Stupid marketers with their desire to track everyone.

Anonymising addresses

[hedgee]

(Second revision of post, fixing some typos.)

I do something very similar to you, except I use my own domain instead of sneakemail. Example:

$ cd ~/.qmail-
$ touch geek-lj-$RANDOM
$ echo $_
geek-lj-19955

This creates an address lj-19955@ck.young.geek.nz (which is a real active address, by the way, which I use for some LJ accounts). If it gets too much spam, I can always repeat the process, which will generate a new email address (with a different number).

How does that work, lurkers and archives might wonder. First, I have this line in my /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains:

ck.young.geek.nz:cky-geek

This means that foo@ck.young.geek.nz gets mapped to local address cky-geek-foo. Then I build my /var/qmail/users/assign with a special flag (-/) so that dot-qmail files are read from ~/.qmail-/geek-foo instead of ~/.qmail-geek-foo.

(This last bit is optional, but allows me to give /.qmail- mode 0700, so that other local users cannot see which aliases I have active on my account.)

Needless to say, removing the dot-qmail file will

Re: Anonymising addresses

[tenbaset]

I think I followed that. :-)

[theroadtoelle]

I type mine twice. Guess I'm just gullible. :)

Or you're just a very fast typist

[hedgee]

Often, I do type things multiple times because that's faster than cutting and pasting, at the speed I type at.

The reason I cut and paste my email address is because it's different for each site I register at (see my response to Shannon), so I have no ‘motor memory’ of the address. (There is enough motor memory of the @ck.young.geek.nz part that I do type it out, manually, twice if necessary.)

That's probably more info than you needed to know. :-)