I've always found myself frowning a bit whenever I need to fill up some form, online or offline, in order to get something I need. Especially when it asks for,

Your E-mail: ___________

The worries are that they'll send me things I didn't want and didn't ask for (aka spam). Or, they'll pass my email to somebody who'll send me things that I didn't want and didn't ask for. Or, my email will be somehow listed in some dark corners of the world, gets picked up by email harvesters and used by those somebodies who'll send me things... you get the drift. Either way, it means plainly that whenever I divulge my email its as good as f***ed.

There are a few ways I'd combated this. Give fake emails (Oops! But I'm not Eric Stellwagon). Give my f***ed-long-ago hotmail which now filters everything to trash (hmm, is it still active? nevermind..), Give disposable email aliases... then what emails do I give to sign-up their service? -sigh- Its only viable when you own a domain name yourself... or is it?

Looks like there is a way to make your own disposable email address. And it looks like Gmail and (surprisingly) my company email (a feature of Hurricane email?) supports it. Yahoo, doesn't appear to support. For purpose of demonstration, I'll use hotmail.com... but whether Hotmail supports it, I don't know.

Suppose your email is joe@hotmail.com, try sending yourself an email to joe+testing@hotmail.com. If you do receive it, you're in. If the mail bounces back, then move along now, nothing else for your to read here.

Now, what does this mean? It means you can now chute-pattern! Yea! Power to the people!

Say you sign up for a Best-Car-Deal membership.. and they say don't worry they'll never pass your info to blah blah blah,... and your spider sense tells you otherwise, give joe+chutepattern@hotmail.com (ooh, inconspicuous! evil!)... then somedays later, as your hunch proves correct, you receive some p****-enlargement spam sent To: joe+chutepattern@hotmail.com in your mailbox... you'll know which ass-'ole sold you out.

If you don't appear listed on the email To: or CC: list, the spammer has used the Bcc: . For such instances, you can always check by looking at the mail header for some lines saying Delivered-To: or something to that effect.

Now go! Go chute all your patterns on them! Have no mercy...