this
is
my
throwaway.email
Is thisismythrowaway.email a public disposable email provider?
As discussed on on the landing page, no.
How can I contact you? Go outside and scream really loud.
No, seriously, I’m getting a lot of spam/malware/chain letters from this domain.
You know email headers can be faked, right? I don’t, as a matter of course, send email from
thisismythrowaway.email—no one would take
it seriously (except, perhaps, the same sorts of people who fall for advance-fee scams). But, in spite of the
fact that I do not normally send email from thisismythrowaway.email,
I have set up proper SPF,
DKIM, and
DMARC records so that you
can tell whether any email from this domain is genuine. Your email provider’s mail transfer and delivery
agents should be checking those records and applying appropriate headers to incoming email, and you or your mail
user agent should be checking those headers and acting appropriately. And actually in many cases your email
provider will probably perform checks and filtering based on the outcome of those checks before the email even
hits your inbox.
All of this is to say that if you think you are getting spam from
thisismythrowaway.email, it is
not actually from thisismythrowaway.email,
but rather some chucklehead who decided to spoof my domain, a thing which is possible because everything is
terrible, the trust-based Internet of the pre-commercial era no longer obtains, and when the
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol was first
designed in 1981, the Internet was still exclusively the province of pocket-protector-wearing nerds and no one
expected that it was going to metastasize in our lives the way that it has, and thus
SMTP was built with the assumption that no mail sender would
ever do anything as underhanded as lying about the origin of the messages they were sending.
NOOOOO!!! YOU CAN’T JUST KEEP GIVING NEW EMAIL ADDRESSES TO EVERY SITE THAT ASKS FOR ONE!! YOU’RE FILLING OUR DATABASES WITH CRAP AND MAKING IT HARDER TO TARGET ADS AND RESELL YOUR DATA!! haha wildcard alias go brrrrr
I know you said this isn’t a public disposable email provider, but will you make an exception for me? No. Set one up yourself. Domains are cheap and so is email hosting. If you don’t want to set it up yourself, or don’t believe yourself capable of doing so, Fastmail has a “Masked Email” feature, and I hear Tim Apple invented a magical and revolutionary new “Hide My Email” feature too, if you pay for iCloud+.
Okay, fine. Will you tell me how to set it up? No.
Doesn’t the “FA” in “FAQ” stand for “Frequently Asked”?
Frequently, yes. However, I wish to avoid creating the impression that anyone has actually asked me any
questions about thisismythrowaway.email, let alone that any of those questions have been asked frequently.
So nobody has actually asked any questions? Correct.
I guess now I have to ask the obligatory non-question question… [in an exasperated monotone] So then this isn’t really a list of frequently asked questions and their answers, but rather just an exercise in masturbation to the sound of your own authorial voice. That’s not a question, but your observation is correct. I applaud your perspicacity and appreciate your indulgence of my infatuation with my own authorial voice, as well as your compliance with the provisions of the Frequently Asked Questions With Answers Documents (FAQWAD) Act of 1987, which, as we all know, requires any FAQ that was written preĂ«mptively, before any Questions were Asked at all, let alone Frequently, to contain at least one meta-question—that is, a question about the FAQ itself—which is posed by an imaginary adversarial interlocutor and phrased as a statement; after all, non-compliance is punishable by a fine of up to $650,000 and a prison sentence of no less than six and no more than fourteen years.